I just upgraded ubuntu on one of my Lightsail instances and ran into a problem with apache.

The upgrade was going from Ubuntu 25.10 to 26.04.

After the upgrade, every time I tried to start apache, I kept getting this error:

(30)Read-only file system: AH00091: apache2: could not open error log file /home/apache2/web_server_dir/error_log.
AH00015: Unable to open log

Searching google returned results about permission errors, a corrupt file system, or SELinux issues.

I determined that there were no permissions issues with the log directory (www-data had read/write access to the logs directory) & the file system was fine. I’m not super familiar with SELinux, but I really didn’t think that was the cause.

After digging for a while, I was able to determine the issue.

Turns out, it was systemd preventing writing the apache server from writing to the logs directory.

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