{"id":77,"date":"2010-06-01T00:00:57","date_gmt":"2010-06-01T05:00:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sushain.com\/blog\/?p=77"},"modified":"2020-06-21T23:17:39","modified_gmt":"2020-06-22T04:17:39","slug":"resolving-403-forbidden-page-error-for-wordpress-blogs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sushain.com\/blog\/resolving-403-forbidden-page-error-for-wordpress-blogs\/","title":{"rendered":"Resolving 403 forbidden page error for WordPress blogs"},"content":{"rendered":"

Few years back, I decided to move and completely re-purpose my blog from Blogger\/Blogspot to WordPress. The transition was mainly driven by a desire to host the blog on my own domain since that gives me a lot more flexibility to customize and manage the content. Luckily, my hosting provider had a ready installation package for setting up a wordpress blog and so that part went relatively smoothly. However, once I tried to launch the landing page of the blog, I got page forbidden (403)<\/em> error. Incidentally, it was occurring on every relative URL\/page for the blog (including \/wp-admin). After quite a bit of hassle, I was eventually able to resolve the issue and things seemed to work alright from that point onward. I thought of documenting an abbreviated version of the procedure in case anyone else might run into a similar problem while transitioning their blog to WordPress.<\/p>\n

Firstly, I checked the permissions on the installation folder (in my case, <root>\/blog<\/em>) and found it to be OK (755 for read \/ execute to world<\/em>).<\/p>\n

Next, I checked .htaccess<\/em> located under \/root folder. I had a prior Ruby on Rails install that had the following configuration –<\/p>\n

RewriteEngine on<\/em><\/p>\n

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^sushain.com$ [OR]
\nRewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.sushain.com$
\nRewriteRule ^contest http:\/\/127.0.0.1:12009%{REQUEST_URI} [P,QSA,L]
\nDirectoryIndex preload.html index.html
\n# BEGIN WordPress<\/em><\/p>\n

# END WordPress<\/em><\/p>\n

I had a hunch that the URL rewriting module might’ve been misbehaving, but didn’t want to tinker with it since I may have needed the RoR app (dormant at the time) to come alive sometime in the future. What I did instead was to change the .htaccess file in the \/blog folder from –<\/p>\n

DirectoryIndex index.php
\nAuthUserFile “\/home\/sushainp\/.htpasswds\/public_html\/blog\/passwd”<\/em><\/p>\n

to –<\/p>\n

DirectoryIndex index.php
\nAuthUserFile “\/home\/sushainp\/.htpasswds\/public_html\/blog\/passwd”
\n# BEGIN WordPress
\n<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
\nRewriteEngine On
\nRewriteBase \/blog\/
\nRewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
\nRewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
\nRewriteRule . \/blog\/index.php [L]
\n<\/IfModule><\/em><\/p>\n

# END WordPress<\/em><\/p>\n

This effectively ended up overriding the URL rewriting defaults for everything matching \/blog\/* URL pattern and thus, resolved the issue. For those of you interested in learning more about URL rewriting module, more information is available here<\/a><\/span>.<\/p>\n

Cheers!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Few years back, I decided to move and completely re-purpose my blog from Blogger\/Blogspot to WordPress. The transition was mainly driven by a desire to host the blog on my own domain since that gives me a lot more flexibility to customize and manage the content. Luckily, my hosting provider had a ready installation package […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":456,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0},"categories":[1],"tags":[186,222,187,223,229,184],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sushain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sushain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sushain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sushain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sushain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=77"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/sushain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1145,"href":"https:\/\/sushain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77\/revisions\/1145"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sushain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/456"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sushain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=77"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sushain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=77"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sushain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=77"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}