I’ve been on a long journey of trying to figure out why after updating to High Sierra OS, my local sites configured through MAMP suddenly didn’t show up. Doing some research led me down the rabbit hole of sudo editing apache .conf files but to no avail. I was seeing a lot of 403 Forbidden messages and also found myself having to create a username.conf file for apache to point to my /Users/username/Sites/ directory. Looking at /private/etc/apache2/users/ before only contained a Guest.conf file. (thought that was odd)
Now what is happening is that my local sites are throwing this message:
Chrome: local.sitename.dev refused to connect
Safari: Safari can’t establish a secure connection to the server
Firefox: The local site works! I can edit files and see my changes instantly so it’s not a cached version.
I notice for some reason each url has https:// instead of http:// assigned to it and I am not sure why.
One additional thing to add - If I am running the OS apache localhost shows “it works!” and localhost/~myusername show a empty Sites directory. When I turn off the OS apache and use the apache configured in MAMP, localhost shows "index of/" the sites in my htdocs folder and localhost/~myusername shows Forbidden on this server.
What in the world is going on?!