How to get a core dump from apache when segfaulting

Solution 1:

My answer is this:

1. Set up the directive as follow

   CoreDumpDirectory /tmp/mycoredump

2. Create the directory:

   mkdir -p /tmp/mycoredump

3. Assign ownership to the directory www-data or httpd

   chown -R www-data:www-data /tmp/mycoredump

4. Set permissions to:

   chmod 777 /tmp/mycoredump

5. Restart Apache:

   service apache2 restart

Solution 2:

Note that if you have PrivateTmp=true set in your /usr/lib/systemd/system/apache2.service (or whatever it's called on your system), meaning Apache actually looks for /tmp inside something like /tmp/systemd-private-c27fc5b152d546159d675e170641529b-apache2.service-IcEt0m/, Apache won't be able to write to that dir and you won't get cores dumped at all (due to the systemd tmp directory having 700 root-only perms).

The solution is to either set PrivateTmp=false or modify the permission of the systemd tmp directory after the server starts.

I wasted hours on this to only just now finally realize what the problem was.