Ubuntu – Apache can’t access folders in the home directory

This is not a good practice, I agree with Weboide. But there is a simple way to achieve this goal.

1). enable the apache userdir module.

sudo  a2enmod userdir

this will enable apache userdir module. Now you can put the contents of website in ~/Webroot/ or whatever inside your home directory.

Note: The default folder is ~/public_html

2). Make necessary changes to /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/userdir.conf.

3). Restart the apache

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Now you can access the site by navigating your browser to http://ip-address/~username. You can also set a virtual host for this site.

If you are looking to run php files you need to do one more step

edit the /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/php5.conf and comment the following lines:

 <IfModule mod_userdir.c>
        <Directory /home/*/public_html>
            php_admin_value engine Off
        </Directory>
    </IfModule>
</IfModule>

Then restart the apache.

Thats it. You are done.

Ref:https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UserDirectoryPHP

Hope this helps. If you face any difficulties feel free to post it here.

You can leave your $HOME dir ownership alone. You don't need to set it to www-data. What you do have to do is ensure that Apache has execute permissions on $HOME and everything above it. So, you could do something like this:

chmod 751 "$HOME"
sudo chmod 751 /home

However, the fact that $HOME is encrypted might pose major problems for Apache unless you can somehow configure Apache to use the proper decryption key.

EDIT:

Setting execute permissions on a directory means only that you can access something inside the directory if you already know its name and if what you're trying to access also has correct permissions. So setting a global x-bit on $HOME isn't too much of a security risk, as long as all your other files have reasonable permissions. You might want to look into your umask to be sure.