This error occurs when the server was unable to complete the request due to denied access to the file. This most often occurs in three cases:

  • There is no index file in the directory (index.html, for example) and viewing the list of files in this directory* or on the entire virtual server is prohibited. You can try creating a file called index.html and see if the error goes away.
  • The access rights to the file were set in such a way that the Apache web server was unable to read the file on the server disk. Try changing the permissions to 644, for example.
  • The user tried to access a script (in the cgi-bin directory) that had incorrect permissions – there is no read+execute (r+x) permission for a specific script. Change permissions to 755.
*By default, viewing the list of files in a directory is disabled. In order to allow the display of a list of files, you need to create a .htaccess file in which you must write the Options + Indexes directive as a separate line.