Item9788: pub-htaccess.txt should mention symlinks

I just pulled down Foswiki-1.1.0, and began installing it at my hosting provider's site. (1and1.com is the hosting provider.)

Things seemed to be going along fine, until I got to the part of registering the first new user. The problem was that the page had almost no formatting on it, and all the images were broken. Upon further investigation, I found that I was getting 500's for everything under /pub. Ok, there is a comment in the pub-htaccess.txt file about how the line 'php_flag engine off' will break apache; that was my first problem.

The subject of this report, however, is that after fixing that problem I then got 403's (access denied) on all URLs under /pub, regardless of whether they existed or not. Someone on IRC suggested it was a missing ErrorDocument URL, but that wasn't it.

gac410 then suggested that maybe the ISP is using symlinks in their apache setup, and so the 'Options None' would be breaking that. I changed to 'Options FollowSymLinks' and now /pub works correctly.

The pub-htaccess.txt file should be updated to mention this, just like it does the php_flag problem. I'd like to see a better way to call out these problems, however, I don't know how to do that now, so can't suggest a better way.

Here is what I did to /pub/.htaccess to make it work:

# Deny people from looking at the index
# Bear in mind that this is largely inadequate
# See http://foswiki.org/System/AccessControl#Controlling_access_to_Attachment
# and http://foswiki.org/Tasks/Item610
# If you think you have a solution it is in your best interests to share it
# so others can test your idea.
#Options None
Options FollowSymLinks

Thanks for building FosWiki!

-- MikePeck - 04 Oct 2010

Mike, Thanks for the task. I've committed an update. *Note 1.2/2.0 updated against the documentation task Item:9787

-- GeorgeClark - 04 Oct 2010

can we make Options FollowSymLinks the default? it is also required for dreamhost, and probably most other shared hosting setups, i'd imagine.

-- WillNorris - 04 Oct 2010

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