After upgrading to a newer MacOS version, I suddenly experienced that sudo apachectl graceful started giving the following error message:
Could not reliably determine the server's fully qualified domain name
The problem
The problem turned out to be that I had previously installed a newer version of apache using brew, and the system was still using that apachectl file.
Running which apachectl gave the following path:
/usr/local/bin/apachectl
And running ls -la /usr/local/bin revealed that apachectl was mapped to an httpd package, that I had installed using homebrew:
lrwxr-xr-x Mar 2 22:40 apachectl -> ../Cellar/httpd/2.4.29_1/bin/apachectl
The solution
The solution in my case was to unlink the “httpd” package that I had installed using Homebrev, since I’m now using the built-in apache that comes with Mac OS.
In other words, I executed the following command: brew unlink httpd
After that, running which apachectl gives the following path:
/usr/sbin/apachectl