Receiving 403 error when reaching a website

Receiving 403 when trying to reach a website

HTTP Error 403 is a HTTP status error received when attempting to access a webpage that is restricted or forbidden, commonly presented when we are testing our website.
Keep in mind that this error can have a variety of reasons to be displayed in our webpage for example, Incorrect File/Directory Permissions or a misconfiguration of your files.
This error can alternatively be displayed like:

• HTTP Error 403 – Forbidden
• Forbidden: You do not have permission to access [directory] on this server
• 403 Forbidden
• Access Denied You do not have permission to access
• 403 forbidden request forbidden by administrative rules

Causes

Assuming our website is running with Nginx:
Cause 1: Incorrect Index File
First make sure the correct file it’s indicated and in index config:
This can be done by accessing the root for our webpage: cd /var/www/html

A simple ls command should enable you to determine the name of our php file.
Next, we open with our text editor the following file: /etc/ngix/sites-available/default

And the following configuration is displayed:

server {
      listen 80;
      listen [::]:80:
      servername example.com;
      root /var/www/html/;
      index index.html index.php;

If the PHP file indicated in index index.html index.php; does not match the name of the file located in /var/www/html we will need to make the changes so the file names match.

Cause 2: Incorrect set of permissions
Navigate to /var/www/html and perform a ls -la to verify the permissions of the directory and the files.

Perform the following commands to provide permissions to your directory and files.

find /var/www/html/ -type d /exec chmod 755 {}\;
find /var/www/html/ -type f /exec chmod 644 {}\;

To verify that permissions have been updated use ls-la again and the following output will confirm the changes.

Now we have verified that the permissions have changed and you should have access to the website.

Conclusion

As we previously discussed, receiving a 403 HTTP Status may have a variety of causes, the 2 from above are just a portion of what a 403 HTTP may represent but are the most common for a test page.