title: Why error 403 when using alias and not redirect directives in apache2 server config?
body: <p>I am new to apache and webservers in general but I have a problem with accessing phps with alias URLs from the web. This is what my config looks like:</p>
  
  <p></p>
  
  <pre><code>ServerAdmin something@gmail.com
  ServerName example.com
  ServerAlias www.example.com
  DocumentRoot /var/www/example.com
  
  AliasMatch "^/index$" "/"
  AliasMatch "^/about$" "/about.php"
  AliasMatch "^/editor$" "/editor.php"
  
  ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log
  CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined
  </code></pre>
  
  <p></p>
  
  <p>The php files that I want to display are located in DocumentRoot folder, and I've made sure root and all its subdirectories and files have permissions 755. What confuses me is that instead of Alias I use Redirect it works fine, except that the browser URL field shows .php which is not desirable. So how come permission is not granted with aliasing but with redirecting? Below is a log entry of attempting to access with site conf file as written above:</p>
  
  <p>127.0.0.1 - - [27/Jan/2017:04:11:55 +0100] "GET /about HTTP/1.1" 403 422 "<a href="http://example.com/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://example.com/</a>" "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/55.0.2883.87 Safari/537.36"</p>
  
  <p>Any help is appreciated, Cheers</p>