Snow Leopard: SSL config clobbered

So today I sit down to do a bit of work on my website only to find that my local version of the site won’t load. It is saying that it can’t reach my server. Well, since the server is running on this very machine, it was clearly an issue with the server software. And I realized that since I recently upgraded to Snow Leopard, it was likely something with the Apache configuration files.

Long story short, it was the SSL configuration file. It is located at /etc/apache2/extra/httpd-ssl.conf and it had been overwritten with the default file. So it pointed to a certificate that didn’t exist. It was thanks to Time Machine that I was able to quickly recover from this. Otherwise I would have had to remember the changes I had made. Let this be a warning to anyone else who hasn’t already upgraded and who has customized the SSL config. This could manifest itself as a server that won’t start (bad) or as an improperly configured security setup (worse).