"Symbolic link not allowed or link target not accessible" / Apache on CentOS 6

Found the issue. Turns out, Apache wants access to not just the directory I'm serving, /home/billy/refresh-app/, but also every directory above that, namely /home/billy/, /home, and /. (I have no idea why... giving someone access to a subdirectory shouldn't require giving away permissions to everything above that subdirectory....)

I would guess it's looking for .htaccess or something, or perhaps *nix being strange about how it treats permissions for directory transversal.

I had a similar problem where I had the following configuration which used to work with Ubuntu 10, but stopped working with Ubuntu 14 (Apache 2.4):

<Directory /var/www/vhosts/example.com/httpdocs>
    Options +FollowSymLinks
</Directory>

Switching to this sorted the problem (even though the web server user wasn't able to directly access the symlink)

<Directory /var/www/vhosts/example.com/httpdocs>
    Options +ExecCGI +FollowSymlinks -SymLinksIfOwnerMatch
</Directory>

From what I can tell its just the -SymLinksIfOwnerMatch setting and has something to do with changes in Apache 2.4 but I haven't tried researching the exact cause.

I also thought it could be down to openbase_dir restrictions in PHP but it wasn't that.

This error can also be caused if you are linking to an encrypted folder.