Spent a few hours yesterday try to fix my localhost web sharing. After a restart none of my local sites were responding, neither from my user account nor the back-up admin account.

This error message kept showing up in my Console:
com.apple.launchd[1] (org.apache.httpd[790]) Exited with exit code: 1

Followed a lengthy process to discount disk errors – (finding and fixing some serious ones) then a clean install and update of the system. Yeuch.

In the end it turns out to have been an error in the latest addition to my virtualhosts in /etc/apache2/virtualhosts. No error in the contents (created by the excellent virtualhost.sh [waybackmachine] script) – but something wrong with the file or its permissions or gawd knows what.

Obscure, strange and particularly annoying when a deadline is looming. Nevermind – next time I know to temporarily disable any virtualhosts when trying to find out what has killed my Apache server.

Last updated on 10th May 2020