Running Passenger on an apache machine to deploy a RoR application I suddenly encountered a default

403 Forbidden – You don’t have permission to access / on this server.

page generated from apache, although it was working before and I didn’t made a single change to my apache server. No real help from the log files:

Directory index forbidden by rule: XYZ

After some time of searching and banging my head against the wall I realized what I did wrong:
I’m using capistrano for “easy” deployment and I added a symlink linking always to the same server “environment.rb”. Of course I had a misstyping there and the symlink and thus the environment.rb was empty. So check your environment.rb file if you get such a 403 page, it may be empty….

Tags: error, not to forget, passenger, rails