WordPress local installation Forbidden You don’t have permission to access / on this server

My WordPress local development installation was throwing the “Forbidden You don’t have permission to access / on this server” error.

The Problem for me was: My Local development environment was using a newer version of Apache (2.4)

Check your Apache version if its 2.4 do the following:

1. Modifying my .htaccess file to:

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>
# END WordPress

2. Modifying my httpd-vhost.conf file for the desired <VirtualHost> sections <Directory> Section content to:

<VirtualHost ... bla ... bla ..

<Directory ...... bla ... bla ..
#The part that I changed

DirectoryIndex index.php
        AllowOverride All
        Require all granted

 </Directory> 
</VirtualHost> 

3. Restart Apache

Other Steps you can take if your Apache version is 2.2

1. Check if mod_rewrite is turned on

2. Restart Apache

3. Clean up .htaccess

4. Try disabling all plugins

I hope this helped

Cheers!