OSX how to show apache status in terminal?

Question

I noticed that on my linux server when i type apachectl restart it gives me little but helpful feedback such as restarting and then [ok] or [fail] at the end of the line. Not much, but at least I know what is going on, and I can go check logs.

On my OS X i get nothing. just the next line immediately:

sh-3.2# /usr/sbin/apachectl stop   
sh-3.2# /usr/sbin/apachectl start
sh-3.2# 

How can I enable those 'debug' features?

Answer 1

How about in the apachectl wrapper script you stick something like this at the end.

tail -5 /var/log/httpd/error_log

you should see something like this in a normal startup

• [Fri Apr 22 23:39:20 2011] [notice] Digest: generating secret for
  digest authentication ...
• [Fri Apr 22 23:39:20 2011] [notice] Digest: done
• [Fri Apr 22 23:39:20 2011] [warn] pid file
  /mlk/apache/pid/httpd.pid overwritten -- Unclean shutdown of previous Apache run?
• [Fri Apr 22 23:39:20 2011] [notice] Apache/2.0.63 (Unix) DAV/2 configured -- resuming normal operations

Otherwise any error should at least in part be shown here. The key phrase is hilighted above.

Additional: /usr/sbin/apachectl is owned by root, you must be a privileged user to do this. sudo vi /usr/sbin/apachectl

move to the end of the file and insert this between the "esac" and "exit $ERROR" lines. ie.

esac
sleep 2; tail -5 /var/log/httpd/error_log
exit $ERROR

Note this will print out the last few lines no matter what action you take with the script, stop start, restart. you may want to only put it in the start part of the case statement.

Answer 2

apachectl on the Mac is a wrapper around some launchctl commands (just look into the file). Unfortunately, launchctl doesn't exit with an error code when something goes wrong with starting httpd, so the script has no easy way to display anything, even if it tries to.

A basic check you can perform yourself is to check the existence of Apache processes after the apachectl start command.

ps aux | grep httpd