Apache VirtualHost 403 Forbidden

Apache 2.4.3 (or maybe slightly earlier) added a new security feature that often results in this error. You would also see a log message of the form "client denied by server configuration". The feature is requiring a user identity to access a directory. It is turned on by DEFAULT in the httpd.conf that ships with Apache. You can see the enabling of the feature with the directive

Require all denied

This basically says to deny access to all users. To fix this problem, either remove the denied directive (or much better) add the following directive to the directories you want to grant access to:

Require all granted

as in

<Directory "your directory here">
   Order allow,deny
   Allow from all
   # New directive needed in Apache 2.4.3: 
   Require all granted
</Directory>

This may be a permissions problem.

every single parent path to the virtual document root must be Readable, Writable, and Executable by the web server httpd user

according to this page about Apache 403 errors.

Since you're using Allow from all, your order shouldn't matter, but you might try switching it to Deny,Allow to set the default behavior to "allowing."

For apache Ubuntu 2.4.7 , I finally found you need to white list your virtual host in apache2.conf

# access here, or in any related virtual host.
<Directory /home/gav/public_html/>
    Options FollowSymLinks
    AllowOverride None
    Require all granted
</Directory>