How to fix a “could not bind to address” error in Apache

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I have worked on a server recently and I came across a problem (again) that I meant to write about, and include a solution should you suffer from a similar problem. It was a Plesk server running CentOS, but this particular issue can also happen on plain LAMP stacks.

Trying to start Apache, I got the following error message:

apachectl -k restart
httpd not running, trying to start
(98)Address already in use: make_sock: could not bind to address [::]:80
(98)Address already in use: make_sock: could not bind to address 0.0.0.0:80
no listening sockets available, shutting down
Unable to open logs

The port number may be different depending on which port Apache is supposed to listen on (80 is the default, but depending on your system it may be something different, for example 7080). What this error is saying is that the Apache config file says the service is supposed to use a specific port, and another service is already using it. Hence, Apache can’t start or restart.

If your server has worked fine before, then it’s likely that the config file is not the problem – so don’t go messing with it unless you absolutely know what to tweak.

Let’s find out what service (or process) is listening on our port. We can do this using the lost command:

lsof -i:80

COMMAND   PID   USER   FD   TYPE    DEVICE SIZE/OFF NODE NAME
httpd   18893 apache    5u  IPv6 216716713      0t0  TCP *:http (LISTEN)
httpd   32576 apache    5u  IPv6 216716713      0t0  TCP *:http (LISTEN)
httpd   32576 apache  178u  IPv4 226927338      0t0  TCP us13659668780097405.dynamiccloudserver.info:33052->br218-ip02.hostgator.com.br:http (CLOSE_WAIT)
httpd   32576 apache  180u  IPv4 236802430      0t0  TCP us13659668780097405.dynamiccloudserver.info:42497->versace.freshwebserver.com:http (CLOSE_WAIT)
httpd   5135 apache    5u  IPv6  24375      0t0  TCP *:empowerid (LISTEN)
httpd   5146 apache    5u  IPv6  24375      0t0  TCP *:empowerid (LISTEN)

Replace the port number (80 in the above example) with your own. In this example, Apache is in fact listening but something isn’t quite right and it’s unable to restart. We can go and kill each of these processes using the following command:

kill -SIGTERM 18893

Do this with every process ID (PID) from the list you get from the lsof command. As soon as they’re all dead (verify with lsof), try to restart apache once again:

apachectl -k restart

This has helped me on a number of occasions 😉



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