We’ve been working hard on a sandbox server. We installed WordPress to it from scratch. I created the database, and imported the previous database into it. The user and password both have been created.
Right now, our error is "403 Forbidden: You don't have permission to access / on this server". I can’t access any of the files by typing in the server IP address,though we see and control everything as root via Putty, or manage it through FileZilla. Root is the owner of all WP files/folders.
I found this source: WPBeginner-403-Error-Fix and am currently changing the permissions on the files; the folders are done and the permissions are set to 755. File permissions are being set to 644. Out of all the resources we had referred to, it never mentioned WP requiring specific permissions. I got right onto that today. While this is running, I still get the message after the folder permissions were changed, and as the file permissions are being processed:
You don't have permission to access /wp-admin/login.php on this server.
We also had a bootstrap file located in the same place as the WP installation / contents (this was a test). The bootstrap is very much accessible: the CSS/JS folders with the supporting content can be seen if you type the ipaddress/directory for the bootstrap version… you can see the files and structure. If you type in ipaddress/boot.html, it runs it flawlessly. If we try referring to anything with WP, it does not like it and throws the 403 error.
There is no .htaccess, I read online it would generate via permalinks in the panel. But we can’t even see the panel. It’s currently .htaccessOLD (from when we imported our old WP contents to the dev server, from the production site), so there should be no interference.
None of us has installed WP directly, the guy who did it previously no longer is part of the company, so we are becoming lost in this process.
Edit: Plugins were disabled via renaming convention, however, WP actually regenerated this folder.
Edit (2): With the permissions set, and the plugin/theme deactivated, it still does not run due to 403.
Weird… my answer didn’t post yesterday as I had thought.
So- we solved it. The permissions were set accordingly for all directories/files, the issue was the server configuration. Just triple check the server configuration file (usually httpd.conf on current servers) to ensure it points to the directory containing the WP contents.
If this is still a problem to some people, and you swear that the httpd.conf file is correct, it does not hurt to double check your directories. The directories should be permission 755. Files should be 644, excluding the wp-config.php (that ought to be set for permissions 455).
Thank you for helping us troubleshoot! We really appreciated it! 🙂