By grammaat46 on

Hi everyone. This is my first post. I've lurked for a few days trying to pickup some tips on handling the problem mentioned above, but I'm still stuck. It seems this topic has been beaten to death but if you could indulge me, I'd appreciate it.

I installed Drupal 4.3.0 to a subdirectory off my root, so I could play with Drupal until I'm ready.
I setup the database and loaded the tables in PHPMyAdmin without problems. I named the database dru so the system assigns the name grammaat46_dru . I created a user with all priveleges named gm and was assigned grammaat46_gm.
I edited includes/conf.php from the file manager in cPanel. I edited the two lines requied....
$db_url = "mysql://grammaat46_gm:xxxxxxx@localhost/grammaat46_dru";
and
$base_url = "http://website.org/drupal";
Saved the file and opened a new browser window and went to website.org/drupal .
Netscape gives me a "403 Forbidden" "You don't have permission to access /drupal/index.php on this server."

One tip said that I was to click "create account" anyway because drupal always says this until the first account is setup. But I get no buttons from drupal, only the Netscape and Apache messages.

Another tip suggested checking the host minimum requirements but these all checked out.

Yet another tip suggested using website.org/drupal/index.php or website.org/drupal/?q=user/register etc. but these still give me the same error.

I've checked and re-checked my typing and made numerous small changes without success. And yes I'm certain that .htaccess was copied across also. Any help would be appreciated.

Mary

Comments

augustwest’s picture

augustwest commented

Sounds like a .htaccess problem. Try renaming .htaccess and see if that fixes it. If you get access after renaming it, make sure that AllowOverride All is specified in your httpd.conf file, if your using a virtual host you can specify it like this:

(anglebraket)Directory "/path/to/directory"(anglebracket) AllowOverride All (anglebracket)/Directory(anglebracket)

between your virtual host tags.

grammaat46’s picture

grammaat46 commented

And yes, that appears to be the problem.

I got several warnings and then the page prints fine.

So. How do I access httpd.conf ? I don't see it in my directories. Do I contact the hosting company and ask to have it changed?

I looked into the string you suggested that I add. Is this inside the .htaccess file? I found some more info on http://www.drupal.org/node/view/3784 and there was some additional information. Would this be the type string that I need...

[VirtualHost *]
DocumentRoot /home/grammaat46/www/drupal
ServerName www.website.org
[directory /home/grammaat46/www/drupal]
AllowOverride All
[/directory]
[/VirtualHost]

Of course I've substituted braces for brackets for readability.

Thanks for the help

Mary

augustwest’s picture

augustwest commented

Yes if you have a host you would need to talk to them and the virtual host string that you have there is correct. Did you try renaming you .htaccess file?

grammaat46’s picture

grammaat46 commented

Yes I did . When named file.1 (no .htaccess file at that point) I got the login screen that I wanted.

I have contacted the hosting company and was told....

use a .htaccess file. if you are unable to use a .htaccess file to make the changes you want, then it cannot be done on our servers.

Is this a dead-end for me?

Mary

Anonymous’s picture

(not verified) commented

*BUMP*

Does anyone know if AllowOverride All is a must? or is there another way for her to use the .htaccess file?

All in all even if not, it is not a dead end since it does work without the .htaccess file. Depending on the php.ini file that your host has you may not need it, since one of the main things other than security, which would could gain from a modified .htaccess file I think, that the .htaccess file does is modify values in the php.ini, but we could do the same thing with php using the ini_set() function.

Hopefully someone else will know more about what is needed for the .htaccess file to work.