I replaced http.conf in mountain lion and can no longer connect to localhost

Question

I was trying to allow for my server to use the RewriteEngine in an .htaccess file so I went into /private/etc/apache2 and tried to edit the http.conf file, but did not have permission.

So I duplicated it, made my edits then saved to Desktop.

I then moved to the httpd.conf file into the same directory as the old. It did not ask me to replace.

I then deleted the old file, and now my computer will no longer connect to localhost server.

What should I do to remedy this?

Thank you for any help that you can give me. I'm not familiar in this area at all.

I notice that their is a httpd.conf.bak file in the same directory which appears to be a backup with system and wheel group privileges. I'm not sure how I restor httpd.conf with this while retaining system and wheel group privileges.

UPDATE: I noticed that I mispelled httpd.conf as http.conf. Sorry for this post.

Answer 1

you can change the owner and group of any file from the console with the chown command:

$chown system:wheel http.conf

Depending what you're doing you might need to execute this with sudo, as in:

$sudo chown system:wheel http.conf

which will ask you for your password, assuming you are the administrator of your own system.