I tried to install CakePHP on my home Ubuntu 10.04 desktop for development/testing purposes, and I believe I have gone through all the appropriate steps. However, I am still running into the problem that my layout is broken. I believe this is a DocumentRoot or mod_rewrite problem, but I don't have enough experience in Apache to diagnose and fix it.

  /var/www/cakephp/.htaccess
  1 <IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
  2    RewriteEngine on
  3    RewriteRule    ^$ app/webroot/    [L]
  4    RewriteRule    (.*) app/webroot/$1 [L]
  5 </IfModule>

  /var/www/cakephp/app/webroot/.htaccess
  1 <IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
  2     RewriteEngine On
  3     RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
  4     RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
  5     RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?url=$1 [QSA,L]
  6 </IfModule>

Firebug gives this: 404 Not Found

Not Found

The requested URL /cakephp/css/cake.generic.css was not found on this server.

I tried setting the permissions of css/ and cake.generic.css to 775. owner is www-data, which is right. tmp is writable too

I also can't access the directory from my browser, 404.

but that will change your default website doccument starting point for your localhost site. if you add more sites to apache2, you'll have errors.

you might want to save your 000-default as a separate file

 /etc/apache2/sites-available/cakephptesting

and configure that file with the proper docroot

and then edit your host file

 /etc/hosts 

and add an entry as

 127.0.0.1 cakephptesting

that will allow you to access the site in a browser at http://cakephptesting

I found the solution. I had to go under /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default and change DocumentRoot to /var/www/cakephp/app/webroot

Now everything loads fine. Thanks!

Sorry,
Signed,
The Apache2 Noob :)