I recently installed a WordPress blog in my localhost using Mac OS X’s built in Apache and PHP with MySQL to test a functionality when I decided to update the permalinks to use a different format other than the default setting. When I tested the new URL, I was greeted with the following error:

Not Found
The requested URL /~user/wordpress/category/sample/ was not found on this server.
Apache/2.2.21 (Unix) DAV/2 PHP/5.3.10 with Suhosin-Patch Server at localhost Port 80

To fix this, create a file and name it <username>.conf, where username is your user account’s short name. Paste the text below within the file:

<Directory "/Users/username/Sites/">
Options Indexes MultiViews FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride All AuthConfig
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Directory>

Save the file and make sure it uses the .conf extension. Copy the file to this location (you may need to provide your credentials to overwrite the current one):

/etc/apache2/users/

Restart Apache to apply the changes by running the following in the Terminal:

sudo apachectl restart

Reapply your permalinks in the WordPress admin by choosing the default option and then setting it back to your desired format.

About the author

Richard Feraro is a web programmer from Manila, Philippines with 10 years of solid open-source development experience using Linux, Apache, MySQL & PHP.

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