I get a forbidden Error once I have activated my SSL certificate

Try changing:

Options Indexes FollowSymLinks

to

Options -Indexes -MultiViews +SymLinksIfOwnerMatch

+SymLinksIfOwnerMatch is a little more secure than just +FollowSymLinks…

Make sure all the files specified in:

SSLCertificateFile "/home/najaaz/eblossom/eblossom_lk.crt"
SSLCertificateKeyFile "/home/najaaz/eblossom.key"
SSLCertificateChainFile "/home/najaaz/eblossom/eblossom_lk.ca-bundle"

are readable by the web-server user (www-data/www-data on Debian/Ubuntu). Make sure /home/najaaz is readable (& probably executable) by the web-server user. Did you really mean to store your Key file in a different place from your Certificate & Chain files?

Also, I think ServerName belongs within a <VirtualHost></VirtualHost> block…

-- sw

Hi @stevewi, I tried what you told me to do, but then it didn't seem to do any difference at all.
I did run sudo service apache2 restart but still I am thrown with the same results.

Anything you could think of? Thanks

@Najaaz --

SSLCertificateFile "/home/najaaz/eblossom/eblossom_lk.crt"
SSLCertificateKeyFile "/home/najaaz/eblossom.key".    # <<-- DIFFERENT NAME & LOCATION
SSLCertificateChainFile "/home/najaaz/eblossom/eblossom_lk.ca-bundle"

Is your Key file really in a different place than your Certificate & Chain files? Did you really use a different naming convention for your Key file?

-- sw

@stevewi, yes it is in a different location and they work perfectly fine.
The SSL certificate is working, and the site is secured, but in the https version of my site, the site doesn't get loaded and only the index of \ appears.
However for the HTTP version of my site, the website loads perfectly fine without any error.
How do I sort it out now?

I dunno… I gave it my best shot. Without it in front of me, it's kinda hard for me to troubleshoot.

Try removing all the python(1)/WSGI stuff and having your SSL site just show an HTML page securely by:

• putting an index.html file in /home/najaaz/eblossom;
• adding DirectoryIndex index.html to the <VirtualHost></VirtualHost> block;
• and re-enabling this:

#       <Directory /home/najaaz/eblossom>
#           Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
#           Require all granted
#           AllowOverride None
#        </Directory>

Once you get your server to serve the index.html file, then you can move on to getting your WSGI app to work…

-- sw

@stevewi
Hey, so I did more research and I figured out, that since I'm using the Django framework to make my site, I need to ensure that my wsgi.py is correctly configured.

And also in the same directory where my config file is, there is another file called default-ssl.conf. I am not sure what this file does exactly but this is what it contains.

<IfModule mod_ssl.c>
        <VirtualHost _default_:443>
                ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost

                DocumentRoot /home/najaaz/eblossom
                DirectoryIndex manage.py /home/najaaz/eblossom/manage.py

                # Available loglevels: trace8, ..., trace1, debug, info, notice, warn,
                # error, crit, alert, emerg.
                # It is also possible to configure the loglevel for particular
                # modules, e.g.
                #LogLevel info ssl:warn

                ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log
                CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined

                # For most configuration files from conf-available/, which are
                # enabled or disabled at a global level, it is possible to
                # include a line for only one particular virtual host. For example the
                # following line enables the CGI configuration for this host only
                # after it has been globally disabled with "a2disconf".
                #Include conf-available/serve-cgi-bin.conf

                #   SSL Engine Switch:
                #   Enable/Disable SSL for this virtual host.
                SSLEngine on

                #   A self-signed (snakeoil) certificate can be created by installing
                #   the ssl-cert package. See
                #   /usr/share/doc/apache2/README.Debian.gz for more info.
                #   If both key and certificate are stored in the same file, only the
                #   SSLCertificateFile directive is needed.
                SSLCertificateFile      /home/najaaz/eblossom/eblossom_lk.crt
                SSLCertificateKeyFile /home/najaaz/eblossom.key

                #   Server Certificate Chain:
                #   Point SSLCertificateChainFile at a file containing the
                #   concatenation of PEM encoded CA certificates which form the
                #   certificate chain for the server certificate. Alternatively
                #   the referenced file can be the same as SSLCertificateFile
                #   when the CA certificates are directly appended to the server
                #   certificate for convinience.
                SSLCertificateChainFile /home/najaaz/eblossom/eblossom_lk.ca-bundle

                #   Certificate Authority (CA):
                #   Set the CA certificate verification path where to find CA
                #   certificates for client authentication or alternatively one
                #   huge file containing all of them (file must be PEM encoded)
                #   Note: Inside SSLCACertificatePath you need hash symlinks
                #                to point to the certificate files. Use the provided
                #                Makefile to update the hash symlinks after changes.
                #SSLCACertificatePath /etc/ssl/certs/
                #SSLCACertificateFile /etc/apache2/ssl.crt/ca-bundle.crt

                #   Certificate Revocation Lists (CRL):
                #   Set the CA revocation path where to find CA CRLs for client
                #   authentication or alternatively one huge file containing all
                #   of them (file must be PEM encoded)
                #   Note: Inside SSLCARevocationPath you need hash symlinks
                #                to point to the certificate files. Use the provided
                #                Makefile to update the hash symlinks after changes.
                #SSLCARevocationPath /etc/apache2/ssl.crl/
                #SSLCARevocationFile /etc/apache2/ssl.crl/ca-bundle.crl

                #   Client Authentication (Type):
                #   Client certificate verification type and depth.  Types are
                #   none, optional, require and optional_no_ca.  Depth is a
                #   number which specifies how deeply to verify the certificate
                #   issuer chain before deciding the certificate is not valid.
                #SSLVerifyClient require
                #SSLVerifyDepth  10

                #   SSL Engine Options:
                #   Set various options for the SSL engine.
                #   o FakeBasicAuth:
                #        Translate the client X.509 into a Basic Authorisation.  This means that
                #        the standard Auth/DBMAuth methods can be used for access control.  The
                #        user name is the `one line' version of the client's X.509 certificate.
                #        Note that no password is obtained from the user. Every entry in the user
                #        file needs this password: `xxj31ZMTZzkVA'.
                #   o ExportCertData:
                #        This exports two additional environment variables: SSL_CLIENT_CERT and
                #        SSL_SERVER_CERT. These contain the PEM-encoded certificates of the
                #        server (always existing) and the client (only existing when client
                #        authentication is used). This can be used to import the certificates
                #        into CGI scripts.
                #   o StdEnvVars:
                #        This exports the standard SSL/TLS related `SSL_*' environment variables.
                #        Per default this exportation is switched off for performance reasons,
                #        because the extraction step is an expensive operation and is usually
                #        useless for serving static content. So one usually enables the
                #        exportation for CGI and SSI requests only.
                #   o OptRenegotiate:
                #        This enables optimized SSL connection renegotiation handling when SSL
                #        directives are used in per-directory context.
                #SSLOptions +FakeBasicAuth +ExportCertData +StrictRequire
                <FilesMatch "\.(cgi|shtml|phtml|php)$">
                                SSLOptions +StdEnvVars
                </FilesMatch>
                <Directory /usr/lib/cgi-bin>
                                SSLOptions +StdEnvVars
                </Directory>

                <Directory /home/najaaz/eblossom/>
                        AllowOverride All
                </Directory>

                <Directory /home/najaaz/eblossom/eblossom>
                        <Files wsgi.py>
                                Require all granted
                        </Files>
                </Directory>

                #   SSL Protocol Adjustments:
                #   The safe and default but still SSL/TLS standard compliant shutdown
                #   approach is that mod_ssl sends the close notify alert but doesn't wait for
                #   the close notify alert from client. When you need a different shutdown
                #   approach you can use one of the following variables:
                #   o ssl-unclean-shutdown:
                #        This forces an unclean shutdown when the connection is closed, i.e. no
                #        SSL close notify alert is send or allowed to received.  This violates
                #        the SSL/TLS standard but is needed for some brain-dead browsers. Use
                #        this when you receive I/O errors because of the standard approach where
                #        mod_ssl sends the close notify alert.
                #   o ssl-accurate-shutdown:
                #        This forces an accurate shutdown when the connection is closed, i.e. a
                #        SSL close notify alert is send and mod_ssl waits for the close notify
                #        alert of the client. This is 100% SSL/TLS standard compliant, but in
                #        practice often causes hanging connections with brain-dead browsers. Use
                #        this only for browsers where you know that their SSL implementation
                #        works correctly.
                #   Notice: Most problems of broken clients are also related to the HTTP
                #   keep-alive facility, so you usually additionally want to disable
                #   keep-alive for those clients, too. Use variable "nokeepalive" for this.
                #   Similarly, one has to force some clients to use HTTP/1.0 to workaround
                #   their broken HTTP/1.1 implementation. Use variables "downgrade-1.0" and
                #   "force-response-1.0" for this.
                # BrowserMatch "MSIE [2-6]" \
                #               nokeepalive ssl-unclean-shutdown \
                #               downgrade-1.0 force-response-1.0

        </VirtualHost>
</IfModule>

Does this help in anyway? And also please remember that there is no PHP used in this, its purely a python based framework called django.

Thanks!

You should remove default-ssl.conf from your config directory. Don't throw it away…just move it out of the config directory. default-ssl.conf is a template config file for setting up SSL. It may contain useful information for you.

You should still try to get your secure site to serve an index.html file as a baseline configuration. After that works, you can tackle getting django app to work.

-- sw