[server] Apache2: 'AH01630: client denied by server configuration'

I get this error when trying to access localhost via a browser.

AH01630: client denied by server configuration

I checked my site folder permissions using:

sudo chmod 777 -R *

Here is my configuration file:

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost

DocumentRoot /home/user-name/www/myproject
<Directory />
    Options FollowSymLinks
    AllowOverride all
    Allow from all
</Directory>

<Location />
  Allow from all
  Order Deny,Allow
</Location>

<Directory  /home/user-name/www/myproject/>
    Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
    AllowOverride all
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all
</Directory>

ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ /usr/lib/cgi-bin/
<Directory "/usr/lib/cgi-bin">
    AllowOverride all
    Options +ExecCGI -MultiViews +SymLinksIfOwnerMatch
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all
</Directory>

ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log

# Possible values include: debug, info, notice, warn, error, crit,
# alert, emerg.
LogLevel warn

CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined

Alias /doc/ "/usr/share/doc/"
<Directory "/usr/share/doc/">
    Options Indexes MultiViews FollowSymLinks
    AllowOverride all
    Order deny,allow
    Deny from all
    Allow from 127.0.0.0/255.0.0.0 ::1/128
</Directory>

Has anyone thought about that wamp server default not include the httpd-vhosts.conf file. My approach is to remove the note below

 conf
  # Virtual hosts
  Include conf/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf

in httpd.conf file. That is all.

In case this helps anyone Googling around like I was, I had this error message trying to access a SVG file on my server, e.g. https://example.com/images/file.svg. Other file types seemed fine, just SVG were failing.

I hunted around /etc/httpd conf files and checked every require all denied type of configuration, and just could not find what config was having this effect.

I turned LogLevel to debug in the VirtualHost config and could see the mod_authz_core logging specifying there was a 'Require all denied' in effect:

[Mon Jun 10 13:09:54.321022 2019] [authz_core:debug] [pid 23459:tid 140576341206784] mod_authz_core.c(817): [client 127.0.0.1:54626] AH01626: authorization result of Require all denied: denied
[Mon Jun 10 13:09:54.321038 2019] [authz_core:debug] [pid 23459:tid 140576341206784] mod_authz_core.c(817): [client 127.0.0.1:54626] AH01626: authorization result of <RequireAny>: denied
[Mon Jun 10 13:09:54.321082 2019] [authz_core:error] [pid 23459:tid 140576341206784] [client 127.0.0.1:54626] AH01630: client denied by server configuration: /home/blah/htdocs/images/file.svg

Through blind testing I moved the file to the root of the web root, and found I could then access it at https://example.com/file.svg .. so it only failed in the 'images' folder. This led me to an .htaccess file in the images folder that I had no idea was there.

Turns out Zen Cart 1.5 comes with an images/.htaccess file that has:

# deny *everything*
 <FilesMatch ".*">
   <IfModule mod_authz_core.c>
     Require all denied
   </IfModule>
   <IfModule !mod_authz_core.c>
     Order Allow,Deny
     Deny from all
   </IfModule>
 </FilesMatch>

 # but now allow just *certain* necessary files:
 <FilesMatch "(?i).*\.(jpe?g|gif|webp|png|swf)$" >
   <IfModule mod_authz_core.c>
     Require all granted
   </IfModule>
   <IfModule !mod_authz_core.c>
     Order Allow,Deny
     Allow from all
   </IfModule>
 </FilesMatch>

This was very annoying and I hope this might remind others to check .htaccess files at every level of the file system leading to the file you're having trouble accessing in case there is this kind of tom foolery going on.

For those who stuck at this error as me and nothing helped from above: check if problem folder from error.log actually exists on your server. Mine was generated automatically by Django in wrong place (was messed with static root, then manage.py collectstatic). Have no idea why one can not name errors correctly.

The problem is in VirtualHost but probablely is not

Require all granted

Confirm your config is correct,here is correct sample

Because this thread is the first thing that pops up when searching for the error mentioned I would like to add another possible cause for this error: you may have mod_evasive active and the client seeing this error simply has crossed the limits configured in your mod_evasive.conf

This is especially a cause worth investigating if you are suddenly getting this error for a client that had no problems before and nothing else has changed.

(if mod_evasive is the cause then the error will go away by itself if the client just temporarily stops trying to access the site; however it may be a sign that you have configured too tight limits)

I got resolved my self after spending couple of hours.

I installed Apache/2.4.7 (Ubuntu) through coookbook in vagrant vm.

/etc/apache2/apache2.conf file does not have <VirtualHost *:80> element by default.

I did two changes to get it done

1. added <VirtualHost *:80>
2. added
   Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
   AllowOverride all
   Allow from all

then finally I just booted vm..

If you have https host then don't forget to make Require all granted changes for ssl config too.

Also, sometimes it's useful to check permissions as the apache user:

# ps -eFH | grep http # get the username used by httpd
...
apache   18837  2692  0 119996 9328   9 10:33 ?        00:00:00     /usr/sbin/httpd -DFOREGROUND
# su -s/bin/bash apache # switch to that user
bash-4.2$ whoami
apache
bash-4.2$ cd /home
bash-4.2$ ls
bash-4.2$ cd mysite.com
bash-4.2$ ls
bash-4.2$ cat file-which-does-not-work.txt

I got another one that may be useful to someone. Was receiving the same error message after upgrading from PHP 5.6 => 7.0. We had changed the PHP upload settings, and forgot to change once copied over. Even though i wasn't uploading images at the time, Silverstripe (our CMS) was refusing to save and throwing that error. Increased the image upload size and it worked straight away.

For me, all proposed solutions won't worked. This can help, if you use cgi, fastcig or fpm as proxy you have to add a location in your vhost to avoid this problem. This allows 404 to be passthrough proxy.

<Location />
require all granted
</Location>

For Wamp 3 (Apache 2.4), besides putting the server online as described in the other answers, in the Virtual Hosts file conf/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf
you might need to replace

Require local

with

Require all granted

This is applicable if in httpd.conf you have

Include conf/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf

Double check that the DocumentRoot path is correct. That can cause this error.

This drove me absolutely nuts for a day and a half but I found a solution if all other solutions have been tried unsuccessfully.

This is for macOS.

• Go to activity Monitor (spotlight search for: activity)
• In activity monitor search for httpd which is the Apache service
• Select the one that belongs to root and click X on the top left to close it.

At that point I immediately stopped getting 403 errors and everything started working as expected. Weird thing is i didn't even have to restart apache it just worked, i guess it restarted itself when i went to my localhost, I honestly don't know but I guess the problem is Apache not actually restarting when using apachectl restart, or stop or start. Hope this helps someone.

This was driving me crazy. Finally figured out what the problem was: I was using direct paths for the error log and they were wrong.

Why does Apache give a vague (and wrong) error message? Instead use a correct and useful error message like: Path for ErrorLog directive "/wrong/path/and/filename.log" is invalid.

Anyway, to fix make sure your error log directives look something like this:

ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log
CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined

I made the same changes that ravisorg suggested to OSX 10.10 Yosemite that upgrades Apache to version 2.4. Below are the changes that were added to http.conf.

<Directory />
    AllowOverride none
    Require all denied
</Directory>

<Directory /Volumes/Data/Data/USER/Sites/>
    AllowOverride none
    Require all granted
</Directory>

Ensure that any user-specific configs are included!

If none of the other answers on this page for you work, here's what I ran into after hours of floundering around.

I used user-specific configurations, with Sites specified as my UserDir in /private/etc/apache2/extra/httpd-userdir.conf. However, I was forbidden access to the endpoint http://localhost/~jwork/.

I could see in /var/log/apache2/error_log that access to /Users/jwork/Sites/ was being blocked. However, I was permitted to access the DocumentRoot, via http://localhost/. This suggested that I didn't have rights to view the ~jwork user. But as far as I could tell by ps aux | egrep '(apache|httpd)' and lsof -i :80, Apache was running for the jwork user, so something was clearly not write with my user configuration.

Given a user named jwork, here was my config file:

/private/etc/apache2/users/jwork.conf

<Directory "/Users/jwork/Sites/">
    Require all granted
</Directory>

This config is perfectly valid. However, I found that my user config wasn't being included:

/private/etc/apache2/extra/httpd-userdir.conf

## Note how it's commented out by default.
## Just remove the comment to enable your user conf.
#Include /private/etc/apache2/users/*.conf

Note that this is the default path to the userdir conf file, but as you'll see below, it's configurable in httpd.conf. Ensure that the following lines are enabled:

/private/etc/apache2/httpd.conf

Include /private/etc/apache2/extra/httpd-userdir.conf

# ...

LoadModule userdir_module libexec/apache2/mod_userdir.so

For all directories write Require all granted instead of Allow from all

Update

If the above doesn't work then also remove this below mentioned line:

Order allow,deny

One obscure (having just dealt with it), yet possible, cause of this is an internal mod_rewrite rule, in the main config file (not .htaccess) that writes to a path which exists at the root of the server file system. Say you have a /media directory in your site, and you rewrite something like this:

RewriteRule /some_image.png /media/some_other_location.png

If you have a /media directory at the root of your server, the rewrite will be attempted to that (resulting in the access denied error) rather than the one in your site directory, since the file system root is checked first by mod_rewrite, for the existence of the first directory in the path, before your site directory.

For me, I had actually updated the Allow and Deny rules based on the 2.4 standard.

Require all granted

However, this was still causing me to receive the same AH01630 error. I found another thread and it suggested reinstalling apache2. Somehow this worked! If anyone cares to explain why, that would be helpful.

Credit to: AH01630: client denied by server configuration but require all granted is set (Apache 2.4, CentOs)

If you are using Apache 2.4 in WampServer on windows OS.

You need to open https-vhosts.conf file in notepad.

C:\wamp64\bin\apache\apache2.4.37\conf\extra\https-vhosts.conf 

If you unable to find above file. check screenshot below

 <VirtualHost *:80>
     ServerName localhost
     DocumentRoot c:/wamp64/www
     <Directory  "c:/wamp64/www/">
        Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
        AllowOverride All
        Require local
    </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

In above code Replace

Require local

with

Require all granted

And save it. Restart Apache service and try again.

If you tail the error log and reload the page, you should see some more information as to the exact problem.

Grab the environment variables so ${APACHE_LOG_DIR} will actually work...

source /etc/apache2/envvars

Then tail and watch...

tail -f ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log

The problem may be that directive is not under < Directory>

https://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/mod/mod_authz_host.html#requiredirectives

The directive can be referenced within a < Directory>, < Files>, or < Location> section as well as .htaccess files to control access to particular parts of the server. Access can be controlled based on the client hostname or IP address.

Beside missing Order and Allow directives mentioned in other answers be aware that a non-matching regular expression of a DirectoryMatch directive may also cause this error.

If the requested path is /home/user-foo1bar/www/myproject/ the folloing matcher won't match

<DirectoryMatch "/home/user-[a-z]+/www/myproject/">
...
</DirectoryMatch>

thus, even a valid access configuration might cause this error.

in my case,

i'm using macOS Mojave (Apache/2.4.34). There was an issue in virtual host settings at /etc/apache2/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf file. after adding the required directory tag my problem was gone.

Require all granted

Hope the full virtual host setup structure will save you.

<VirtualHost *:80>
    DocumentRoot "/Users/vagabond/Sites/MainProjectFolderName/public/"
    ServerName project.loc

    <Directory /Users/vagabond/Sites/MainProjectFolderName/public/>
        Require all granted
    </Directory>

    ErrorLog "/Users/vagabond/Sites/logs/MainProjectFolderName.loc-error_log"
    CustomLog "/Users/vagabond/Sites/logs/MainProjectFolderName.loc-access_log" common
</VirtualHost>

all you've to do replace the MainProjectFolderName with your exact ProjectFolderName.

This "bug" is actually the new normal behavior of Apache 2.4. In my case, I had a very specific rule to deny access to any folder or file with name starting with ".", so I had to set an exception for a particular public folder that requires such odd name.

For the record my particular Rewrite rule is:

RewriteRule "(?!\.trusted)(^|/)\." - [F]

This rule [F]obits everything starting with "." but .trusted, thanks to the magic of regex "?!" negation.

When using Ubuntu check whether the CGI module is enabled. If not:

sudo a2enmod cgi

I actually solved this one by adding the directory access to the :80 entry.

 <Directory "c:/whatever-directory-you-use/">
    AllowOverride All
    Require all granted
</Directory>

Before everyone gets all 'security' on me, under my specific circumstances this is not a security issue.

If you are using a remote resource, I'd recommend instead make sure your CURL request goes via HTTPS / TLS, then this directory entry goes on the 443 port.