I have a locally hosted website that uses Smarty templates, I'm trying to get started on building an API for the site.

I've used virtualhost.sh to create a local virtual host for this and other sites.

I've discovered that if I put a directory called api at the root of any of these virtual hosts I will get a 503 error when I try to access anything inside.

I am using mod-rewrite but so far only to append a .php extension when needed.

Here are the error logs for a request:

[Thu Feb 09 13:42:37 2012] [error] proxy: HTTP: disabled connection for (localhost)
[Thu Feb 09 13:49:06 2012] [error] (61)Connection refused: proxy: HTTP: attempt to connect to [fe80::1]:8080 (localhost) failed
[Thu Feb 09 13:49:06 2012] [error] ap_proxy_connect_backend disabling worker for (localhost)

The middle line gave me a clue to look in my hosts file because why would a request go to [fe80::1]:8080? I commented out that line and tried again, this time the error was in connecting to the standard 127.0.0.1 localhost.

I have concluded that perhaps there is some config file somewhere picking up the underlying request of localhost/api and pointing it somewhere other than my virtual host. At this point my ability to fix the problem fails me. Can anyone help?