Apache quirks

[lovingboth]

One of the best ways to get the Apache webserver to fail to start is to ask it to have a logfile in a directory that doesn't exist. I suspect every user has been caught by this at least once.

This 'feature' has doubtless cost users thousands of hours work, not least as it won't tell you exactly why it's not starting (or at least 1.3 via webmin doesn't, they may have fixed this in 2.x) or ask if you want to create the directory or any other useful response.

But... if you ask it to serve webpages from a non-existent directory, it'll start up happily, and not moan or give any hint as to what's (not) happening.

Comments

Automation Is Us, aka. Why Should We Check Things If We Have A Computer That Can Check Things For Us

[bondagewoodelf.livejournal.com]

We have a check script that runs over the httpd.conf file before trying to stop, restart or start apache. If the logfile location is missing, it does not want to stop/restart/start unless you give it a force option. We also get a warning if a non-existing document-root is present in the current httpd.conf, but it starts/stops/restarts nonetheless.

[mattp.livejournal.com]

I've been bitten by the missing log file directory, and many of the clients of employer[current-2] had it happen to them

I'm sure I've seen a "DocumentRoot does not exist" error in the past.