Today, I started to work again with the fast and small but powerful PHP framework Kohana. I used Kohana 1 on a Linux machine years ago but now it’s Kohana 3.1 on Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard). Anyway, shortly after the successful “installation” I wanted to get rid of the mentioning of index.php in the URL. I knew about .htaccess and mod_rewrite from my previous Kohana projects. This time the framework even came with a predefined .htaccess file. However, I didn’t get it to work and only got 404 Not Found messages when I activated the .htaccess file.

After some research I figured out that I had to change the None of AllowOverride in /etc/apache2/users/<USER_NAME>.conf to All. That got me from 404 Not Found messages to 403 Forbidden messages. After some more research and trail and error, I found out that the trick was to append FollowSymLinks to the Options in the above mentioned conf file.