Amazon EC2 Apache Symbolic Link Not Allowed

Question

I have created an Amazon EC2 instance and installed Apache and PHP on it:

$ sudo yum install apache2
$ sudo yum install php
$ ls -al /var/www/services/
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root   42 Jun 22 21:13 production -> /home/ec2-user/services

The I have created new VirtualHost:

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName ec2-***.compute-1.amazonaws.com
    DocumentRoot "/var/www/services/production/public"

    <Directory "/var/www/services/production/public">
        Options Indexes MultiViews FollowSymLinks
        AllowOverride All
        Order deny,allow
        Allow from all
    </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

Now, when I run my request in the browser, it says 403 Forbidden and the log shows symlink problem:

[Wed Jun 22 21:14:19 2011] [error] [client ***] Symbolic link not allowed or link target not accessible: /var/www/services/production
[Wed Jun 22 21:14:20 2011] [error] [client ***] Symbolic link not allowed or link target not accessible: /var/www/services/production

What's wrong? Is EC2 blocking symlinks? Please help!

Answer 1

UPDATED

Now, the only problem I could think of is permission to access production by apache user. Make sure the permission to /var/www/services/production (& the target folder) folder is set to 0755 on both symbolic links & target folder .

Test: Become the user as apache ( sudo -u apache ) and now try to change into the directory ( cd ) and make sure apache user is able to traverse.

Answer 2

Does Apache have read permissions on /home/ec2-user/services? Symlinks are by design 0777 for permissions, but only so everything flows through to take up the permissions of whatever the symlink is pointing at.