On my Mac OS 10.5 machine, I would like to set up a subfolder of ~/Documents like ~/Documents/foo/html to be http://localhost/foo.

The first thing I thought of doing is using Alias as follows:

Alias /foo /Users/someone/Documents/foo/html

<Directory "/Users/someone/Documents/foo/html">
    Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews

    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all
</Directory>

This got me 403 Forbidden. In the error_log I got:

[error] [client ::1] (13)Permission denied: access to /foo denied

The subfolder in question has chmod 755 access. I've tried specifying likes like http://localhost/foo/test.php, but that didn't work either. Next, I tried the symlink route.

Went into /Library/WebServer/Documents and made a symlink to ~/Documents/foo/html. The document root has

Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews

This still got me 403 Forbidden:

Symbolic link not allowed or link target not accessible: /Library/WebServer/Documents/foo

What else do I need to set this up?

Solution:

$ chmod 755 ~/Documents

In general, the folder to be shared and all of its ancestor folder needs to be viewable by the www service user.