<p>Configuring Apache really isn’t rocket science. There are a wealth of great tutorials online, the documentation is very well documented, and the defaults work more or less out of the box. But it’s one of those jobs that I do just infrequently enough that I always forget things in the interim, and end up making the same old mistakes.</p>
<p>So, I’m writing this post both as a means of christening this devlog (<ahref="https://demos.ajstepien.xyz">Hi! I’m Andrzej! Hire me!</a>) and also as a reminder to myself that <em>the home folder is not executable by default.</em></p>
<p>Please, Andrzej. Please. The next time you’re building a website, be it for a client or for yourself, and you find yourself scratching your head, wondering what error you may have made in the <code>.confs</code>, checking the permissions of your symlink again and again, ask yourself: is my symlink pointing to a directory in the home folder? Because Apache can’t open the home folder until you change the permissions!</p>
<p>In Linux we open directories by ’executing’ them. A directory is an executable that maps part of the file-system for us. Now, by default, the home directory is only executable by its owner. This makes sense when you think about it – you don’t want your sister, or co-worker, or (more likely) whatever barely-audited application you’re installing today, to be able to open that directory. But you probably <em>do</em> want your webserver to be able to open it, especially if you are symlinking to it from <code>/var/www</code> or wherever.</p>
<p>There are lots of reasons why you’d want to deploy to the home directory of an unprivileged user. I do this exact same thing with <ahref="https://jenkins.io">Jenkins</a>, and I wasted an hour troubleshooting this exact same problem when I set up that server too.</p>
<p>So, Andrzej of the future (did anyone non-ghoulish win an election yet?), for future reference, let’s say you’re deploying to <code>/home/devlog/website</code>:</p>
<ol>
<li>Add Apache to the ‘devlog’ user group.</li>
