XAMPP Apache not working on Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS

Question

I have been searching for hours now and I cant find a solution. I have tried much to many things to even start listing the things. So please any assistance would be appreciated.

I have changed the htdocs folder location in httpd.conf because I have all my files sync to cloud storage. This works perfectly on my windows machine but on linux not so much. Every thing runs perfectly but when I try to access my htdocs folder (new location) I get a message:

Access forbidden!

You don't have permission to access the requested directory. There is either no index document or the directory is read-protected.

If you think this is a server error, please contact the webmaster.
Error 403
localhost
Apache/2.4.48 (Unix) OpenSSL/1.1.1k PHP/8.0.10 mod_perl/2.0.11 Perl/v5.32.1 

But When I change the location back to the normal location it works perfectly.

I have already gave full access to the folder.

Answer 1

Think of a directory structure as a series of security doors:

/var
/www
/htdocs

If you give someone a key to htdocs (i.e. set the permissions to give a user access) then they can open that door… but only if they can get to it.

If you don't also give them keys to www and var then they can't get into htdocs.