Apache won't follow symlinks (403 Forbidden)

Check that Apache has execute rights for /root, /root/site and /root/site/about.

Run:

chmod o+x /root /root/site /root/site/about

You can find a more secure way in Elijah's answer.

The 403 error may also be caused by an encrypted file system, e.g. a symlink to an encrypted home folder.

If your symlink points into the encrypted folder, the apache user (e.g. www-data) cannot access the contents, even if apache and file/folder permissions are set correctly. Access of the www-data user can be tested with such a call:

sudo -u www-data ls -l /var/www/html/<your symlink>/

There are workarounds/solutions to this, e.g. adding the www-data user to your private group (exposes the encrypted data to the web user) or by setting up an unencrypted rsynced folder (probably rather secure). I for myself will probably go for an rsync solution during development.

https://askubuntu.com/questions/633625/public-folder-in-an-encrypted-home-directory

A convenient tool for my purposes is lsyncd. This allows me to work directly in my encrypted home folder and being able to see changes almost instantly in the apache web page. The synchronization is triggered by changes in the file system, calling an rsync. As I'm only working on rather small web pages and scripts, the syncing is very fast. I decided to use a short delay of 1 second before the rsync is started, even though it is possible to set a delay of 0 seconds.

Installing lsyncd (in Ubuntu):

sudo apt-get install lsyncd

Starting the background service:

lsyncd -delay 1 -rsync /home/<me>/<work folder>/ /var/www/html/<web folder>/

I was having a similar problem that I could not resolve for a long time on my new server. In addition to palacsint's answer, a good question to ask is: are you using Apache 2.4? In Apache 2.4 there is a different mechanism for setting the permissions that do not work when done using the above configuration, so I used the solution explained in this blog post.

Basically, what I needed to do was convert my config file from:

Alias /demo /usr/demo/html<Directory "/usr/demo/html">    Options FollowSymLinks    AllowOverride None    Order allow,deny    allow from all</Directory>

to:

Alias /demo /usr/demo/html<Directory "/usr/demo/html">    Options FollowSymLinks    AllowOverride None    Require all granted</Directory>

Note how the Order and allow lines have been replaced by Require all granted