I know this question is asked a lot, but the solutions I saw didn't work for me.

I only have one virtual host enabled, and I'm trying to enable access to a folder that's not under the document root

ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost

DocumentRoot /var/www/html



Alias /movies /home/username/Videos/Movies



<Directory /home/username/Videos/Movies/>

    Options Indexes FollowSymLinks

    AllowOverride None

    Require all granted

</Directory>

I set /etc/apache2/envvars as follows

export APACHE_RUN_USER=www-data

export APACHE_RUN_GROUP=public

I made sure that /home/username/Videos/ and its sub folders are owned by username:public, set the permissions to 777 (after 775 didn't work) and made sure that user www-data belongs to group public.

Now, when I browse to http://localhost/movies I get

[Mon Apr 21 11:28:14.971844 2014] [core:error] [pid 1385:tid 140067725104896] (13)Permission denied: [client 127.0.0.1:46603] AH00035: access to /movies/ denied (filesystem path '/home/username/Videos') because search permissions are missing on a component of the path

But when I set /etc/apache2/envvars to run Apache under username (my own username) everything works fine. The problem is permission related, but I don't see how in my case; especially when I set the permissions to 777. Any ideas?

P.S. Ubuntu version is 14.04, Apache is 2.4.7 and I didn't edit other configuration files.