Moving 'Sites' folder to Dropbox

Question

I'm trying to move my standard ~/Sites folder, or the global Sites folder (in Library/WebServer/Documents) to my Dropbox folder, and make this usable with Web Sharing, PHP, MySQL etc.

So far I have changed the httpd.conf in etc/apache2 to overwrite these lines:

# original: DocumentRoot "/Library/WebServer/Documents"
DocumentRoot "/Volumes/Macintosh HD/users/cannyboy/Dropbox/Sites"
# original: <Directory "/Library/WebServer/Documents">
<Directory "/Volumes/Macintosh HD/users/cannyboy/Dropbox/Sites">

But when I browse http://localhost I get:

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

Does anyone have any ideas on how to get this to work?

Answer 1

You could just move the Sites folder into the Dropbox folder - and then make a link/alias from the new Dropbox location back to ~/Sites.

After you've moved the Sites folder into Dropbox you right click on the Sites folder in Dropbox, and then choose "Make Alias" and move this alias into ~/ (remember to rename it to Sites) - alternativ create the alias this way: Can I create Window-style alias in Finder?

Answer 2

I don't know default mod for Dropbox folder, but Sites have read access for anyone (such as apache web server) :

ls -Alh ~/

drwx------+ 26 Bil   staff   884B 25 jui 12:40 Desktop
drwx---rwx  22 Bil   staff   748B 24 jui 19:01 Documents
drwx------+ 11 Bil   staff   374B 24 jui 16:47 Downloads
drwx------  49 Bil   staff   1,6K 21 jui 10:07 Library
drwx------+  5 Bil   staff   170B 11 aoû  2010 Movies
drwx------+  5 Bil   staff   170B 26 avr 16:37 Music
drwx------   8 Bil   staff   272B 26 avr 10:35 Pictures
drwxr-xr-x   6 Bil   staff   204B  9 déc  2009 Public
drwxr-xr-x+ 17 Bil   staff   578B 23 jui 14:23 Sites

To change access of Dropbox, type in Terminal.app

chmod a+r ~/Dropbox

But be careful, once you've change directory's mod, everybody can read view/read it's content.