"You don't have permission to access / on this server"
I can't imagine Drupal 8 is supposed to have this done on every installation.


You're right, it only needs to be done in .htaccess where altering the web server config isn't an option (think shared hosting).

In a local dev environment you don't have that problem, so just update the vhost with something like

&lt;Directory "/var/www/site/public_html"&gt;
  Options FollowSymLinks
  AllowOverride All
  Require all granted
&lt;/Directory&gt;


and re-start/load Apache for it to take effect.