"Symbolic link not allowed or link target not accessible" on fresh installed XAMPP for Linux

I did a fresh-install of XAMPP for Linux (version 1.7.4) on my Ubuntu 11.04 x64 laptop. Then I made a link in my htdocs folder to my project folder:

$pwd
/opt/lampp/htdocs
$sudo ln -s /home/petra/projects/webapp webapp
$ls -al
drwxr-xr-x  4 nobody root 4096 2011-08-18 11:58 .
drwxr-xr-x 18 root   root 4096 2011-01-25 15:33 ..
lrwxrwxrwx  1 root   root   26 2011-08-18 11:42 webapp -> /home/petra/projects/webapp

When I opened the webapp in the browser using http://localhost/webapp, it only showed "403 Access Forbidden". The error log said:

$tail -f /opt/lampp/logs/error_log
[Thu Aug 18 11:43:15 2011] [error] [client 127.0.0.1] Symbolic link not allowed or link target not accessible: /opt/lampp/htdocs/webapp

Here is the httpd.conf. Strangely, the FollowSymLinks options are already defined (default).

There is a similar question on the XAMPP forum开发者_Go百科 but I think nobody seems to pay attention to it anymore.

Does anyone have an idea how to fix this?

Try to run Apache using your user.

By default Apache runs as "www-data" so edit your apache2.conf, and search for "user" and set:

user=youruser

Restart Apache and voilà, it should work.

I found out that if I use link from directory outside /home/petra, the web-app is working normally. I guess it's because I use Encrypted Home Directory setting on my Ubuntu.

I just have to move the project directory outside my home directory to make it work.

I ran into this problem when I symlinked the document root to code sitting on my encrypted home directory. I also solved it by running apache as the user who owned the encrypted content.