How do I trouble shoot an Apache 500 Internal Server Error? (restart, status, tail... then what?)

Question

Here's what I've done so far

[username@VMname /]$ sudo /etc/init.d/httpd restart
[username@VMname /]$ sudo /etc/init.d/httpd restart
Stopping httpd:                                            [  OK  ]
Starting httpd:                                            [  OK  ]
[username@VMname /]$ /etc/init.d/httpd status
httpd (pid  23043) is running...

Then tried running...

tail -f /var/log/httpd/error.log

That returned file not found, so I looked and this is what I see:

[username@VMname /]$ cd /var/log/httpd
access_log  access_log.1  error_log  error_log.1  ssl_access_log  ssl_error_log  ssl_error_log.1  ssl_request_log

Any help is much appreciated. Thanks in advance!!

Solution

First:

tail -f /var/log/httpd/error_log

not error.log

Check your apache config file for a line with

LogLevel

I would suggest

LogLevel error

until you figure out the error. warn/debug might be too verbose