Fixing broken homebrew-installed httpd on macOS

2022-01-07 14:12:03 +0100 +0100

I use httpd from Homebrew (brew install httpd) as the web server for my local MediaWiki development instance. Mostly that works just fine, and I’ve documented how I’ve set it up in another post here.

Yesterday httpd broke after a brew upgrade and I had trouble figuring out why.

brew services list
Name              Status  User    File
black             started kostajh ~/Library/LaunchAgents/homebrew.mxcl.black.plist
dbus              none
emacs-plus@27     none
httpd             error  6 kostajh ~/Library/LaunchAgents/homebrew.mxcl.httpd.plist
mariadb           none
memcached         started kostajh ~/Library/LaunchAgents/homebrew.mxcl.memcached.plist
php               none
php@7.4           started kostajh ~/Library/LaunchAgents/homebrew.mxcl.php@7.4.plist
redis             started kostajh ~/Library/LaunchAgents/homebrew.mxcl.redis.plist
selenium-server   none

Looking at the error.log wasn’t helpful either:

cat /opt/homebrew/var/log/httpd/error_log

[Thu Jan 06 11:41:59.585519 2022] [core:notice] [pid 3003] AH00052: child pid 3393 exit signal Segmentation fault (11)
[Thu Jan 06 11:41:59.587071 2022] [mpm_prefork:notice] [pid 3003] AH00169: caught SIGTERM, shutting down

Eventually I stumbled across a clue to run httpd in foreground mode:

httpd -DFOREGROUND
dyld[69073]: Symbol not found: _apr_bucket_file_set_buf_size
  Referenced from: /opt/homebrew/Cellar/httpd/2.4.52/bin/httpd
  Expected in: /usr/lib/libaprutil-1.0.dylib
[1]    69073 abort      httpd -DFOREGROUND

Aha. That led me to this StackOverflow post where the solution was as simple as brew reinstall apr-util.