I have been playing with Codeigniter a lot lately. I was in the middle of working on something when MAMP gave me a 403 error.

The error was “403 Forbidden You don’t have permission to access / on this server” Navigating to any folder would give me the 403 error as well, even http://localhost:8888/MAMP/?language=English.

This was a pretty simple issue to correct. Not simple enough at the time though

1. Stop all MAMP servers (Apache and MySQL Server)
2. Navigate to Applications/MAMP/conf/apache
3. Open httpd.conf
4. You can probably open it with TextEdit. I opened it with Dreamweaver. Just make sure TextEdit is editing it in plain text format and not rich text format.
5. Find the following section of code (on mine it was on line 378):
   <Directory />
   Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
   AllowOverride All
   </Directory>
6. Change “AllowOverride All” to “AllowOverride None“
7. Save the file
8. Start MAMP and test the pages.

If that doesn’t work for you, you can always Google it. The MAMP forums have a lot of posts about it.