Hey Francois, sorry to hear you are having trouble. Did you copy the website files directly into the htdocs directory or into a subdirectory like htdocs/mylocalwebsite? If the former, that’s probably the problem. Each local site goes into its own folder inside htdocs. Apologies if the tutorial doesn’t make that clear enough. I will schedule it for edits immediately.

I want to make a copy of my production web site that uses wordpress. So I followed the steps up to step 5. There, instead of following steps 5 through 7, I decided to copy my website contents in the destination directory (htdocs). I used “rsync -rlpt” to copy the web site files.

Alas, all I get is “Access forbidden! You don’t have permission to access the requested directory. There is either no index document or the directory is read-protected.”

I checked, and absolutely all files have read permission. So, the error must be because of the “no index document”, right ? What “index document” could it be complaining about ?

Thank you for your reply,
Francois

Hi Sahiba, it shouldn’t be asking you to log in, but try “root” as the username and leave the password field blank.

Thanks,
Sahiba

Hey Kris, the single quotes definitely have to be there. You should only change the text inside them. What I would advise you to do is the following:

1. Move your wp-config.php file somewhere else. Make a copy of wp-config-sample.php inside your WordPress installation and rename it to wp-config.php. Then, redo the process of inputting your database name, user, password, and hostname without changing anything else. Save and try if that solved the problem.
2. Alternatively, simply remove wp-config.php from the WordPress installation (don’t delete it right away, just move it somewhere else). Access your local URL, this should trigger the installation process once more. Run through it, giving your database credentials. Don’t worry, your content will not be affected by this.
3. If neither of this solves the issue, make a copy of your entire local installation. Then, delete everything inside the active installation except for .htaccess, wp-config.php, and the wp-content directory. Download a fresh copy of WordPress from WordPress.org and copy and paste all files from there except for the ones you left inside your local installation. If the problem still persists, run though 2. again.

Let me know if the issue persists.

Do you have any idea how I could solve this? I’ve tried Googling, but I’m technically not a coder so I don’t really understand the jargon.

Thanks for the additional comments, Marc. Glad it all worked out in the end.