Apache: cannot edit httpd.config

1) Do not edit the file in TextEdit. If you want to use a GUI editor, download an install TextWranger -- when prompted, answer Yes to installing the command line utilities.

2a) If you downloaded/installed TextWrangler, open a Terminal window and type "sudo edit /etc/httpd/httpd.conf" and enter your password. Sometimes that is not enough to make the file writeable in TextWrangler -- there is a little icon in the upper-left corner of TextWrangler's toolbar letting you know if the file is currently writable. If there is a line through it, just click it and authenticate if necessary.

2b) If you don't want to or can't install TextWrangler, on the command line type "sudo vi /etc/httpd/httpd.conf" or "sudo pico /etc/httpd/httpd.conf". Pico is simpler to use, but I have found that sometimes it can add line breaks to long lines, which is particularly undesirable in this case, so use VI if you're going to do it this way.

"Now I need to know how to restart apache so that my changes will take effect!"

Via the command-line utility apachectl which needs to be run via sudo/as root:

sudo apachectl graceful

You can also use the 'restart' command instead of 'graceful', but 'restart' forces a restart of the server, whereas 'graceful' will allow existing, in-progress connections to complete.

In any case I would still change the permissions of the httpd.conf file back. It's a potential security issue.

Actually, it does sound like you're making progress. Apache, in it's default config, writes it's error messages to /var/log/httpd/error_log . Rely on error_log for helpful information, the browsers tend to "pretty" things so much that the info is fairly useless.

It sounds like your shtml file was read by the server, but had an error in the SSI line. As finicky as SSI syntax is, that's not too big a surprise. If you copied the SSI, it's very likely that any path in it is different on OSX.

Roger