Symbolic link not allowed or link target not accessible

Issue :

When i was migrating cPanel account to another server through command line using a /scripts/pkgaccount. The package was successfully migrated to a new server and the domain was live again on the new server.But the issue is several functionalities of the site was not working and i got following error was appearing in apache error log constantly

symbolic link not allowed or link target not accessible

Possible reasons :

1. Your apache configuration doesn’t allow to Follow Sym Links.
2. Your SymLink owner doesn’t match (This usually happens on WHM/cPanel since cPanel assigns a unique user for every domain)

Solutions :

• Fix “symbolic link not allowed or link target not accessible” on WHM/cPanel Server :

1. Connect to your WHM/cPanel with root privileges from browser e.g http://serverhostname:2086 or http://serverip:2086
2. Go To

Main >> Service Configuration >> Apache Configuration >> Global Configuration

Check FollowSymLink

FollowSymLinks

You can also Simply change ownership of your symlink files to particular user from command line.

For Example:

Domain name : testdomain.com

cPanel user : testuser

• Go to Document root of your domain
• cd /home/testuser/public_html/
• Change ownership

chown testuser:testuser  *

If you are still having difficulties or unable to change ownership of files or its just not working.

You can again Go To

Main >> Service Configuration >> Apache Configuration >> Global Configuration

Uncheck SymLinksIfOwnerMatch

SymLinksIfOwnerMatch

Save it! It should rebuild Apache configuration and reload httpd daemon.

You can also change the same from command line using following steps:

On CentOS/Ubuntu/RedHat:

1. vim /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf
2. Add

Options +FollowSymLinks -SymLinksIfOwnerMatch

3. Reload httpd

                     /etc/init.d/httpd reload

On debian base distro;

  /etc/init.d/apache gracefull

If you don’t have access to httpd.conf, you can add this in your .htaccess of your document root.

               vim .htaccess

              Options +FollowSymLinks -SymLinksIfOwnerMatch

Save it! Here you don’t need to reload httpd daemon.

Note :  Using .htaccess method you need to make sure, your httpd.conf is configured/instructed to read .htaccess in your document root.

That’s it. Hope this will help you 🙂