I woke up one morning and my MAMP installation on Mac OS X Snow Leopard had decided that I was not entitled to log into my phpMyAdmin. All the sites worked in apache but access to:

/MAMP/?language=English
Or
/phpMyAdminForPHP5/index.php
Or
/phpMyAdmin/

Just produced a message saying: “You don’t have permission to access /phpMyAdminForPHP5/index.php on this server.” with the Error code 403.

After digging deep into the forums I found no answers. I had a Drupal install that needed a new Database so decided to look under the bonnet to see what had gone wrong. This lead me to the: httpd.conf file of apache. A more familiar file to some of us. I scan the file for differences and noticed that MAMP was looking at symbolic links. In this section:

# First, we configure the "default" to be a very restrictive set of
# features.
#

    Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
    AllowOverride All

As most of the AllowOverride conditions are set to None I decided to change this and test. It worked straight away.

So for me this change to:

# First, we configure the "default" to be a very restrictive set of
# features.
#

    Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
    AllowOverride All

Stopped the message: “You don’t have permission to access /phpMyAdminForPHP5/index.php on this server.” and made everything work perfectly. I would love to understand exactly why, but I am a little busy at the moment to dig deeper. If anyone has an answer please let us know.

 Mail this post

Technorati Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Leave a Reply