Debugging the Debugging Environment

It can be pretty frustrating to sit down to do some web coding, only to find that the development IDE or server isn’t working correctly. One then spends the time planned for development on simply debugging the development environment instead.

This often happens to me due to the following things:

1. I’ve deleted a project’s folder without removing the vhosts reference to it. This will cause the Apache server to fail to start.

2. I’ve made changes to the httpd.conf or httpd-vhost.conf file without restarting Apache right away to confirm that the settings work correctly.

The easiest way to debug this is to look in the Apache log files. Apache can also be manually started using apache2/bin/httpd and may generate messages.

1. Try to launch the ZendServer control panel. Sometimes this fails if the system is still starting up, so wait until boot up is complete.

2. Check the Apache error_log.

3. Try manually starting using apache2/bin/httpd.

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