[ACL] Access to context [/image/] is denied!

The error “[ACL] Access to context [/] is denied! usually shows up on Litespeed servers when the rewritten URLs conflict with or are blocked by the security rules in the .htaccess file. It is often triggered by misconfigured rewriting rules or wrong file permissions. This requires a review of the website rewrite rules. In this article we show you how to fix this issue.

• When attempting to load a site, you can face a 403 error, and /var/log/apache2/error_log contains an entry which is similar to the following:

2024-03-28 13:44:26.929433 [INFO] [1225923] [T0] [203.0.113.2:52317-H3:CF429B-4#APVH_domain.tld:443] [ACL] Access to context [/] is denied!


• The 403 error occurs due to incorrectly constructed Deny rules in the website. .htaccess file. Deny rules are most often found in Filesmatch directives.

<FilesMatch "\.(ico|pdf|flv|swf|js|mjs|css|gif|png|jpg|jpeg|txt|woff2|woff)$">
Order Allow,Deny
Deny from all
</FilesMatch>

Steps to Fix the Deny Rule

1. Access the server’s command line via SSH or “Terminal” in WHM or cPanel.
2. Open the site’s .htaccess file in the text editor you want.
3. Make any necessary changes to the rules related with the Deny rule.
4. Please note that when using Order Allow,Deny, the Deny from all rule will deny all traffic regardless of Allow rules.
5. Save the changes and exit the text editor.

Conclusion

Follow the above steps to review the redirect rules under your account and correct them. This is because the redirect rules conflict with the ones set in .htaccess file.