Isn’t it irritating to see ‘Lighttpd error 403‘ plaguing in the website?

This error normally occurs due to like improper file permissions, incorrect configurations and many more.

At Bobcares, we often receive requests to fix Lighttpd errors as a part of our Server Management Services.

Today, we shall discuss what causes 403 errors to occur in Lighttpd and see how our Support Engineers fix it.

What is Lighttpd?

Lighttpd is an open-source web server. It is a small and extremely economical web server.

Its memory and CPU consumptions are smaller when compared to other web servers like Apache, IIS. Also, it is easy to configure. That’s why, Lighttpd is one of the best solutions for the servers having high load problems.

Top reasons for Lighttpd error 403 to occur

Before getting into how to fix this error, let’s just discuss the causes of it.

Below are the reasons that cause a 403 error to occur.

1. Incorrect configuration set in Lighttpd

Customers always get confused with the configuration files.

There are different configuration files in a server. And things work only if we add appropriate details in the right configuration file.

If a wrong module is enabled on the Lighttpd configuration file, then it will end up with an error.

2. Improper permissions cause 403 error

Permissions are something that can never be neglected. This is one of the common causes of most of the errors occurring in the server.

And the same goes for Lighttpd 403 error as well. The webserver needs proper privileges on the files. If the files and folders are having incorrect permissions then it is obvious that the website will display an error message.

So the right permissions are very important for any files and folder to execute successfully.

How we fix Lighttpd error 403?

Having a decade of experience in managing servers, our Dedicated Engineers are familiar with the Lighttpd errors. Now, let’s discuss how we fix this error.

1. Configuration file problem

Recently, one of our customers approached us telling that he was receiving ‘lighttpd 403 forbidden error’. And informed that he had enabled mod_fastcgi by adding codes in Lighttpd.conf file in the path /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf

Our Support Engineers started troubleshooting this error by checking Lighttpd error.log. We could see the below contents

(mod_fastcgi.c.1397) [ERROR]: spawning fcgi failed.

Here, the PHP configuration was not set properly. We fixed this error by enabling the FastCGI in modules.conf file placed in the path /usr/share/doc/lighttpd/config/modules.conf

The corrected code in modules.conf appeared as below.

server.modules = (
"mod_access",
"mod_fastcgi",
# "mod_alias",
# "mod_auth",
# "mod_rewrite",
# "mod_setenv",
)

2. Fixing the permissions

One of our customers installed Lighttpd on Debian. Only a simple HTML file was set up in the document root. However, he was receiving 403 forbidden error while surfing the website.

Our Support Engineers started troubleshooting this error by checking the error log. But, there were no errors logged in it.

Then, we checked the permissions of the folder.

Here, we could see that the execution rights were not given to the file. Thus, this error was caused due to incorrect permissions.

We fixed this error by changing the permissions of the document root using the command

chmod 750 document_root

[Need any assistance in fixing Lighttpd errors? – We’ll help you]

Conclusion

In short, the Lighttpd error 403 occurs due to improper file permissions or ownerships or due to error in the configuration file. Today, we saw how our Support Engineers fix this error.