scripts.mit.edu

MIT SIPB Script Services for Athena

How do I make a file accessible to Apache? (I'm getting a 403 Forbidden error)

To mark a single file accessible to Apache

You can run
chmod 777 FILENAME
to make a single file named FILENAME accessible to the Apache web server.

To mark an entire directory world-readable

If you want to make an entire directory world-readable, you can change its AFS access control list in order to do so. You can do so by “cd”-ing to the directory and then running
fs sa . system:anyuser read
(You should run these commands on an Athena workstation or dialup, instead of directly on the scripts servers.) It may take some time for Scripts to pick up the permission changes; you can speed up the process by running
athrun scripts for-each-server fs flushv

If you would like to make programs that are normally executable downloadable by the user, you will also need to create a .htaccess file containing the following:

<Files *>
SetHandler none
</Files>

This instructs Apache to pass the files through directly, rather than attempting to interpret them as code.

Technical Information

The file system on Athena (AFS) usually ignores chmod modes, but scripts.mit.edu normally restricts AFS access to a home directory to the owner of that home directory. However, the special mode 777 has special meaning on scripts.mit.edu (we run a modified AFS client), and indicates that the Apache web server may directly access the file. No other chmod modes will have the same effect.

This is usually not needed for actual scripts or even most static content (such as .html files), since those files are accessed via your user account. It was previously needed for .htaccess files, but now (as of June 2009) Apache is given implicit read permission on all files whose names begin with “.ht”, such as .htaccess and .htpasswd.

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