Apache

If you've tried to develop a website and the files are on an external drive, you might find that httpd will refuse to serve the files. In your browser you'll see:

And in your Apache error log you'll read:

The trouble is, you've checked that the directory is readable and it is. Permissions are correct! You might even have messed with the "Ignore ownership on this volume" checkbox but it doesn't fix the problem.

For me, the issue was caused by macOS's builtin Security and Privacy controls. I'm using MacPorts to install my development stack. I have MacPorts set to use launchctl to start my httpd server in /Library/LaunchDaemons/org.macports.apache2.plist. This plist uses the daemondo wrapper to start httpd.

After giving daemondo (and thus its child process, httpd) Full Disk Access, everything was happy.

When setting up a second SSL Apache virtual host, you may be frustrated when your browser can't connect and tells you something like

Safari can't establish a secure connection to the server "servername"


In your ssl_request_log you see baffling entries like this:

"\x16\x03\x01" 240
"\x16\x03" 240


This is because you have forgotten to enable SSL for your virtual host with the following:

SSLEngine on


You'll probably need some other SSL-based directives in there, too.

Reference:

http://www.noah.org/wiki/Apache2_Invalid_method_in_request_%5Cx16%5Cx03%5Cx01