Andy Jarrett // Code. Develop. Create.

Apache won't start on Mac Yosemite (or another OS)

After finally getting around to updating Yosemite on my Mac Apache started being a headache. Initially it had commented out my Virtual Hosts includes line in httpd.conf, but when that was fixed it simply wouldn't start up at all. Every time I ran $ sudo apachectl start I just kept seeing the following in the Console.app.

com.apple.xpc.launchd[1]: (org.apache.httpd) Service only ran for 0 seconds. Pushing respawn out by 10 seconds.  

As this didn't help I had to run the following to get a more detailed reason on why Apache is failing on me.

$ sudo apachectl stop
$ sudo apachectl # without any parameters i.e. stop/start/restart

The second command will dump the config errors and warnings of the Apache httpd to the terminal and my problem was simple:

Invalid command 'RewriteEngine', perhaps misspelled or defined by a module not included in the server configuration  

I simply uncommented the load libexec/apache2/mod_rewrite.so line in httpd.conf and I was good to go with

sudo apachectl start

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