Change the DocumentRoot folder in apache cause permission issue

Question

I installed a LAMP in my AWS EC2 instance. The DocumentRoot folder is in /var/www/html. What I did is to copy the html folder into my /home/ec2-user and rename it to www. Then the DocumentRoot is changed to /home/ec2-user/www. Of course the https.conf is changed accordingly. Here it is:

#DocumentRoot "/var/www/html"
DocumentRoot "/home/ec2-user/www"

<Directory />
    #Options FollowSymLinks
    #AllowOverride None
    Options Indexes FollowSymLinks Includes ExecCGI
    AllowOverride All
    Order deny,allow
    Allow from all    
</Directory>

#<Directory "/var/www/html">
<Directory "/home/ec2-user/www">

The problem is I got the following error message after I restart the https service.

You don't have permission to access / on this server.

The owner and the permission is the same for both folder. Here are the screenshots:

I searched in stack overflow and found some similar issues. But none of them work for me. Can anybody help? Thanks

Answer 1

the issue is the user apache runs as, is not ec2-user.

You could change it, but putting your doc root inside of the ec2-user's home directory is probably not a good idea. More then likely everything you do on your instance is as the ec2-user (who is a sudoer and has access to pretty much everything), so if someone was to compromise a script that apache is running, they would literally have full control over your instance.