I'm trying to set up my first Apache server on my Windows PC at home and I have real trouble finding out which configuration settings go where. I downloaded and installed XAMPP which seemed to get everything nicely set up and can see a working website on http://localhost. So far so good.

The point of this is to develop a website of course, and to make my life easier (irony?), I wanted to let the web site root point to my Eclipse project folder. So I opened httpd-vhosts.conf, uncommented a VirtualHost block and changed its DocumentRoot to my local path.

Now when I try to load http://localhost I get a 403 (Access denied) error. So where do I configure permissions for my folder? And is that all I need to let my site run from the folder specified or am I going to have to clear another hurdle?

Update: I tried to simplify things a little, so I reinstalled XAMPP and got back to a working http://localhost. Then I confirmed that httpd-vhosts.conf is included in httpd.conf and made the following changes to httpd-vhosts.conf:

1. Uncommented the line NameVirtualHost *:80

2. Added a virtual host shown below. Restarted Apache and saw the expected page on http://localhost

   <VirtualHost *:80>
     DocumentRoot "C:/xampp/htdocs/"
     ServerName localhost
     ErrorLog "logs/dummy-host2.localhost-error.log"
     CustomLog "logs/dummy-host2.localhost-access.log" combined
   </VirtualHost>
   

3. I then created a new folder named C:\testweb, added an index.html file and changed the DocumentRoot line shown above. For all intents and purposes I would then expect the two configurations to be equivalent. But this setup gives me an error 403.

4. Even though the C:\testweb folder already had the same permissions as the C:\xampp\htdocs folder, I then went further and gave the Everyone group full control of C:\testweb and got exactly the same problem.

So what did I miss?