apachectl doesn't start, but no errors

I'm running apache2 on Mac OS 10.3.9. My apache server was running
fine for months, but I restarted my machine yesterday and now when I
try to start apache it returns quietly, without error, but all attempts
to connect to localhost through a web browser say unable to connect to
host, and running 'sudo apachectl stop' reports that no httpd process
was running (no pid file found). 'sudo ps' also shows no httpd process
running. I'm using 'sudo apachectl start' or 'sudo httpd -k start' to
start.

When I run 'sudo httpd -e debug -k start', it reports that it's loading
various modules, then returns quietyl to the prompt after it reports
having loaded mod_rewrite. Again, afterwords the server is not
running, but no errors were reported. I don't know if it's supposed to
report more events after loading the modules or not.

Any ideas what's going wrong, or how I could get more diagnostic
information out of it? I have something of a deadline for a client.
I'd hate to have to rebuild everything from source.

- Jake

For those interested in the solution, the problem was that I didn't
realize there is an ErrorLog directive one can specify in httpd.conf
for the web server as a whole. I have three VirtualHosts specified,
each of which overrides the ErrorLog directive with its own, but errors
that occur outside the scope of a specific VirtualHost go in the log
specified by httpd.conf's ErrorLog directive. Once I looked in that
error log, the specific startup problem was that one of my virtual
hosts specified an ErrorLog of its own, but the directory it specified
for the error log didn't exist, so errors couldn't be written to it.
Creating the missing directory solved the problem.

Incidentally, the reason this occurred after startup is that I'd
defined the new virtual host while apache was running a couple weeks
ago, but hadn't restarted the webserver yet.

- Jake


jacob.miles@gmail.com wrote:
> I'm running apache2 on Mac OS 10.3.9. My apache server was running
> fine for months, but I restarted my machine yesterday and now when I
> try to start apache it returns quietly, without error, but all attempts
> to connect to localhost through a web browser say unable to connect to
> host, and running 'sudo apachectl stop' reports that no httpd process
> was running (no pid file found). 'sudo ps' also shows no httpd process
> running. I'm using 'sudo apachectl start' or 'sudo httpd -k start' to
> start.
>
> When I run 'sudo httpd -e debug -k start', it reports that it's loading
> various modules, then returns quietyl to the prompt after it reports
> having loaded mod_rewrite. Again, afterwords the server is not
> running, but no errors were reported. I don't know if it's supposed to
> report more events after loading the modules or not.
>
> Any ideas what's going wrong, or how I could get more diagnostic
> information out of it? I have something of a deadline for a client.
> I'd hate to have to rebuild everything from source.
>
> - Jake

For those interested in the solution, the problem was that I didn't
realize there is an ErrorLog directive one can specify in httpd.conf
for the web server as a whole. I have three VirtualHosts specified,
each of which overrides the ErrorLog directive with its own, but errors
that occur outside the scope of a specific VirtualHost go in the log
specified by httpd.conf's ErrorLog directive. Once I looked in that
error log, the specific startup problem was that one of my virtual
hosts specified an ErrorLog of its own, but the directory it specified
for the error log didn't exist, so errors couldn't be written to it.
Creating the missing directory solved the problem.

Incidentally, the reason this occurred after startup is that I'd
defined the new virtual host while apache was running a couple weeks
ago, but hadn't restarted the webserver yet.

- Jake


jacob.miles@gmail.com wrote:
> I'm running apache2 on Mac OS 10.3.9. My apache server was running
> fine for months, but I restarted my machine yesterday and now when I
> try to start apache it returns quietly, without error, but all attempts
> to connect to localhost through a web browser say unable to connect to
> host, and running 'sudo apachectl stop' reports that no httpd process
> was running (no pid file found). 'sudo ps' also shows no httpd process
> running. I'm using 'sudo apachectl start' or 'sudo httpd -k start' to
> start.
>
> When I run 'sudo httpd -e debug -k start', it reports that it's loading
> various modules, then returns quietyl to the prompt after it reports
> having loaded mod_rewrite. Again, afterwords the server is not
> running, but no errors were reported. I don't know if it's supposed to
> report more events after loading the modules or not.
>
> Any ideas what's going wrong, or how I could get more diagnostic
> information out of it? I have something of a deadline for a client.
> I'd hate to have to rebuild everything from source.
>
> - Jake