I'm running Apache 2.4.38-3+deb10u3 on a Debian/Stable server on an AMD64 machine.
When I create a virtual host under /var/www, everything works as expected. However, if I change the virtual host's document root to another folder on the same machine, I get
Forbidden
You don't have permission to access this resource.
Apache/2.4.38 (Debian) Server at <servername>.local Port 80
where I use .local instead of the live site's actual TLD to refer to my local server.
I get the same thing if I replace the public_html folder with a link to the other folder. To be clear, the folder and files in it are owned by the same account & group. And I can cd to the other folder through the link, so it's working.
Also to be clear, when I go to <servername>.local with the
site in /var/www/<servername>.local/public_html, it works.
A reason I want to move the sites is that /var is in my system partition, which runs off of a small SSD, while the other folder in on a RAID-6 array with lots of space.
When I search for the problem, I see a lot of "solutions" that say just change the document root of the vhost and restart Apache 2. However that isn't working in my case. This is likely Debian specific but all the Debian stuff only shows vhosts under /var/www, which isn't what I want.
Any ideas?