XAMPP - Apache could not start - Attempting to start Apache service

Question

While trying to start Apache using XAMPP, I was receiving - \"Attempting to start Apache service...\" message in XAMPP UI. No further details were availabl

Answer 1

Had the same issue while updating to PHP7.2

Problem: First I closed skype and then checked whether port 80 is not an issue. How you can check that? See @AlexT comment above.

In my case, port 80 wasn't an issue. So now I had to figure out what was wrong. So I checked Error Logs Control Panel > Even viewer > Windows Logs > Application and found following error against Apache2.4

httpd.exe: Syntax error on line 520 of C:/xampp/apache/conf/httpd.conf: Syntax error on line 18 of C:/xampp/apache/conf/extra/httpd-xampp.conf: Cannot load C:/xampp/php/php7ts.dll into server: The Apache service named is not a valid Win32 application.

Which means I had installed wrong PHP version. Actually I downloaded win64 version while the required version was Win32 for me.

So I downloaded correct version from: Download PHP 7.2.0 extracted it in C:/xampp/php folder, restarted the apache and it worked :)