In case you develop Magento 2 project (or some other web application) on local Yosemite and sometimes you see 403 Forbidden error you are reading right article.
So, during my Magento 2 development and other projects I was getting an error which annoyed me every time. The error says:
You don’t have permission to access .htaccess on this server.
I’ve spent hours debugging my apache2 configurations (httpd-vhosts.conf, user.conf, httpd.conf), file permissions, maximum allowed opened files in the system. My initial guess was that Yosemite system limits amount of files opened. That was I saw in error (Too many files opened). I increased this limit, however error did show again. Randomly.
Of course when you develop with Magento 2 having lots of files you could also think that it can’t handle big amount of files. That was I thought.
How to fix
In order to resolve the 403 Forbidden problem you have to adjust permissions for user which is used to run localhost server.
1. Find your username with this command:
whoami
2. Then navigate and check if you have config for this user or create if doesn’t exist:
cd /etc/apache2/user/ touch <username>.conf
Where username is an user name used to run Apache server.
3. Add the following configuration (note that this is only for Yosamite):
sudo vi /etc/apache2/user/<username>.conf
Add the following content:
<Directory "/Users/<username>/Sites/"> AddLanguage en .en LanguagePriority en fr de ForceLanguagePriority Fallback Options FollowSymlinks Indexes MultiViews AllowOverride All Order allow,deny Allow from localhost Require all granted </Directory>
4. Add lines in the /etc/apache2/httpd.conf
configuration file:
sudo vi /etc/apache2/httpd.conf
Check and uncomment the line:
Include /private/etc/apache2/extra/httpd-userdir.conf
5. In the httpd-userdir.conf
file ensure to uncomment line:
Include /private/etc/apache2/users/*.conf
6. Restart Apache server
sudo /usr/sbin/httpd -k restart
Enjoy developing your Magento 2 projects.

Max Pronko is an international Magento Expert, development consultant, motivational speaker and Magento award-winning developer. He is known for the educational development programs for organizations of all sizes and has positively affected thousands of people and organizations worldwide.
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