Fixing Web Sharing after a Time Machine restore
Has anyone had any problems lately with Web Sharing not working at all? Say, after restoring from Time Machine? I just noticed it a few days ago, but didn’t pay much attention; after all I just use the Mongrel bundled with Rails. But today I was checking the Console and noticed this:
Jun 20 12:18:46 Delta org.apache.httpd[11920]: (2)No such file or directory: httpd: could not open error log file /private/var/log/apache2/error_log.
Jun 20 12:18:46 Delta org.apache.httpd[11920]: Unable to open logs
Jun 20 12:18:46 Delta com.apple.launchd[1] (org.apache.httpd[11920]): Exited with exit code: 1
Crap. Of course. I remembered that a few weeks earlier I had replaced my PowerBook’s aging 80GB hard drive with a brand new 160GB one, and restored my Mac OS X installation with Time Machine. As James Duncan Davidson notes in his Restoring from Time Machine article, Time Machine automatically excludes a bunch of stuff like caches and logs, so Apache’s log directory is not recreated during a restore, and that caused it to crash and burn.
So, anyway, to fix it, just open up the terminal and type sudo mkdir /private/var/log/apache2. I hope this helps someone with the same problem.