Failed Apache2 start, no error log

Question

I would restart Apache2 but there comes an Error

$ sudo service apache2 start

Starting web server apache2

Action \'start\' failed.
The Apache error log may hav         


        

Answer 1

I also just ran in to a similar problem, that is service apache2 reload fails but prints no useful information. This is because the script in /etc/init.d/apache (on Debian, at least) eats the output of the apache2ctl configtest command it runs to sanitize the Apache config.

An easy solution to get a more meaningful explanation for the failure is to run apache2ctl configtest again yourself, which will print the (hopefully useful) error messages to the console.