Apachectl is one of the most popular methods to administer Apache server i.e httpd. I mostly use it for hosting some web apps during testing locally since it’s built in and requires minimal setup.
The problem
However, I recently ran into the following error while trying apachectl command to check the server status.
[renju][~][$] apachectl status
bin/apachectl: line 95: lynx: command not foundNow, what is lynx?
A quick google search explained that lynx is a utility text-based browser in unix that is used by httpd
The quick Solution
Anyway, the quick solution is to install lynx in your machine.
I used brew to install it using the below command:
brew install lynx
And that’s it. apachectl works as expected now.
The harder way
If you don’t use HomeBrew(I feel bad for you) or if you would prefer mundane tasks, you can also download it from here and install it yourself:
Probable root cause
I assume this could have been caused due to me messing around with the brew versions or packages last week. That’s the only recent action I remember of that could have caused this. Lynx might have been a dependency for one of the packages and might have been removed due to brew package uninstallation and cleanup!