Recently, I had a friend setup a CentOS server for me as I personally have experience setting up and managing lamp on Ubuntu servers but needed a CentOS expert. Anyhow, the way to manage Apache on CentOS is a bit different than how it’s done on Ubuntu or debian based Linux. So I was trying to open my site and it wouldn’t connect. After ssh-ing into my box, I realized apache is not working and I needed to restart. Usually on Ubuntu you’d do
httpd restart
but it doesn’t really work, so after a couple minutes of googling, I found it
apachectl start
And, here is the error I got
Syntax error on line 295 of /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf:
DocumentRoot '/var/www/html' is not a directory, or is not readable
Now issue was, I deleted the directory without checking if it’s used by apache as I usually remove the default config of apache using `html` directory for default site config. I know, noob mistake. Anyhow, I created that director again and this time
apachectl start
worked like a charm. But I didn’t give up on the httpd command just yet. So tried it again
# httpd restart
Usage: httpd [-D name] [-d directory] [-f file]
[-C "directive"] [-c "directive"]
[-k start|restart|graceful|graceful-stop|stop]
[-v] [-V] [-h] [-l] [-L] [-t] [-S]
Options:
-D name : define a name for use in directives
-d directory : specify an alternate initial ServerRoot
-f file : specify an alternate ServerConfigFile
-C "directive" : process directive before reading config files
-c "directive" : process directive after reading config files
-e level : show startup errors of level (see LogLevel)
-E file : log startup errors to file
-v : show version number
-V : show compile settings
-h : list available command line options (this page)
-l : list compiled in modules
-L : list available configuration directives
-t -D DUMP_VHOSTS : show parsed settings (currently only vhost settings)
-S : a synonym for -t -D DUMP_VHOSTS
-t -D DUMP_MODULES : show all loaded modules
-M : a synonym for -t -D DUMP_MODULES
-t : run syntax check for config files
This time I realized I was doing it without the extra params I had to give to httpd command, so here we go:
[-k start|restart|graceful|graceful-stop|stop]
Now I just wanted to try it
# httpd -k stop
# httpd -k restart
So the first one stops it, I checked after and the site won’t load. That means it worked. Then I simply used restart ( I could have used -k start to start as well) to get it up and running.
This time, above command works perfectly. So a little but of learning today. Moral of the story, just try a little harder before googling it.
Hope this helps 🙂
Link to official CentOS page regarding starting and stopping apache. https://www.centos.org/docs/5/html/Deployment_Guide-en-US/s1-apache-startstop.html