I’ve been doing lots of mod_rewrite stuff lately which has necessitated restarting Apache over and over again. Before doing so, I always run the command “apachectl configtest” to ensure the configuration is correct. Passing the configtest option parses the configuration files and either reports “Syntax OK” or outputs detailed information about the particular syntax error. Most people will recklessly stop and start Apache without doing this, but if you have an error in your config the Apache startup process will fail. If Apache does not start, you web server is down, and if your web server is down….
