On my development machine I want Apache to run under my user id so I can automatically generate files (and have permission to write them).

I configured Apache like this:

root@mercy:/etc/apache2# grep -R www-data .
./envvars:export APACHE_RUN_USER=www-data
./envvars:export APACHE_RUN_GROUP=www-data

root@mercy:/etc/apache2# vim envvars 

export APACHE_RUN_USER=jj5
export APACHE_RUN_GROUP=jj5

root@mercy:/etc/apache2# apache2ctl graceful
/var/lock/apache2 already exists but is not a directory owned by jj5.
Please fix manually. Aborting.

root@mercy:/etc/apache2# chown jj5:jj5 /var/lock/apache2

root@mercy:/etc/apache2# apache2ctl graceful

Easy-peasy!

Wait… that didn’t work. The problem was apache2ctl graceful didn’t pick up the new envvars file, this fixed it:

root@mercy:/etc/apache2# /etc/init.d/apache2 restart