Apache on OSX Yosemite

I was recently doing some web stuff on my laptop for the first time in a while. I could pull up the "It Works!" page, but nothing else.
This Apple forum post solved it.
Blogged here to help search results :)

You don't have permission to access / on this server.

More fun with Apache.

There was a time when I could configure Apache without the help of Google. Alas, that time was years ago.

I wanted several versions of Apache on my machine so that I could test different mod_cluster configurations side by side.

I downloaded the Apache source, built it and put in "/examples" under my home directory. After I started it I got :

You don't have permission to access / on this server.

I immediately checked the directory permissions. They looked okay. I spent some time monkeying with the SELinux security settings.

The problem was simple: Apache needs execute permissions all the way up to the root directory.

Simply moving my "examples" directory to the root fixed it.

httpd dead but subsys locked

While firing up apache this morning I got nothing. A quick "httpd status" returned an interesting message :

httpd dead but subsys locked

I have no idea when the lock got created. I assume it was the last time I ran apache. I don't use it as a daemon.

The solution was simply to delete the lock :

sudo rm /var/lock/subsys/httpd

All was well after that.