Virtual hosts & symbolic links, why can’t I set DocumentRoot to a symbolic link

apache-2.2symbolic-linkvirtualhost

I have recently setup Capistrano on my server and it works great.
I changed my virtual hosts to point to the symbolic link created by Capistrano.
My virtual hosts file:

<VirtualHost *:80>
    DocumentRoot /var/www/html/my_app.com/current
    ServerName my_app.com
    <Directory />
    Options FollowSymLinks
        AllowOverride Indexes
    </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

When I restart my apache server using sudo service httpd restart, I get the error: 

Warning: DocumentRoot [/var/www/html/my_app.com/current] does not exist

The current directory definitely exists. When I set the vhost to point to .../my_app.com/, it works and shows the default apache page, the problem is this symbolic link to current (which is updated as I deploy applications using capistrano).

I am using a Amazon ec2 instance, apache 2.2 (LAMP).

so basically, how do I point a virtual host to a symbolic link?

Update
The output of ls-l: 

lrwxrwxrwx 1 ec2-user ec2-user   57 Aug 28 22:40 current -> /var/www/html/my_app.com/releases/20120828223437
drwxrwxr-x 3 ec2-user ec2-user 4096 Aug 28 22:40 releases
drwxrwxr-x 6 ec2-user ec2-user 4096 Aug 28 16:01 shared

In my httpd.conf(comments stripped out):

<Directory "/var/www/html">
    Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
    AllowOverride all
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all
</Directory>

My Error Logs:

[Wed Aug 29 00:04:39 2012] [error] [client 87.194.51.136] Symbolic link not allowed or link target not accessible: /var/www/html/my_app.com/current
[Wed Aug 29 00:04:40 2012] [error] [client 128.30.52.73] Symbolic link not allowed or link target not accessible: /var/www/html/my_app.com/current
[Wed Aug 29 00:04:40 2012] [error] [client 87.194.51.136] Symbolic link not allowed or link target not accessible: /var/www/html/my_app.com/current, referer: http://mydomain.com/

The ouput of ls -l for /var/www/html/my_app.com/releases/20120828223949.

drwxrwxr-x 6 ec2-user ec2-user 4096 Aug 28 22:39 20120828223949

When I run the command ls -l /var/www/html/my_app.com/current/

ls: cannot access /var/www/html/my_app.com/current/: No such file or directory

Looks like a dead symlink… How do i fix this?

Best Answer

As-per-my-comment and your follow-up it looks like your current symlink doesn't point to a valid target; remove it and re-add it:

$ rm -f /var/www/html/my_app.com/current
$ ln -s /var/www/html/my_app.com/{releases/20120828223949,current}
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