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

On Apache on Linux there might be a problem that the configuration cannot be checked because of a problem with environment variables not being set. This is a false positive which only occurs when running apache2 -S from commandline (See previous answer from @simhumileco). For instance Config variable ${APACHE_RUN_DIR} is not defined.

In order to fix this run source /etc/apache2/envvars from the commandline and then run `apache2 -S' to get to the real (possible) problems.

root@fileserver:~# apache2 -S
[Thu Apr 30 10:42:06.822719 2020] [core:warn] [pid 24624] AH00111: Config variable ${APACHE_RUN_DIR} is not defined
apache2: Syntax error on line 80 of /etc/apache2/apache2.conf: DefaultRuntimeDir must be a valid directory, absolute or relative to ServerRoot
root@fileserver:~# source /etc/apache2/envvars
root@fileserver:/root# apache2 -S
AH00558: apache2: Could not reliably determine the server's fully qualified domain name, using 127.0.1.1. Set the 'ServerName' directive globally to suppress this message
VirtualHost configuration:
<----snip---->
ServerRoot: "/etc/apache2"
Main DocumentRoot: "/var/www/html"
Main ErrorLog: "/var/log/apache2/error.log"
Mutex ldap-cache: using_defaults
Mutex default: dir="/var/run/apache2/" mechanism=default
Mutex mpm-accept: using_defaults
Mutex watchdog-callback: using_defaults
PidFile: "/var/run/apache2/apache2.pid"
Define: DUMP_VHOSTS
Define: DUMP_RUN_CFG
User: name="www-data" id=33
Group: name="www-data" id=33
root@fileserver:/root#