After accidentally running another web server on the same port as Splunk Web, how do I fix "Waiting for web server to be available..."?

[dwood023]

I accidentally ran another web server on the same port as the Splunk Web server (8000) and since then, I've been unable to start Splunk. The start process gets stuck at "Waiting for webserver at http://127.0.0.1:8000"; and I am left unable to access the web UI.

What I've tried:

• I've stopped the other web server
• I've changed Splunk web and Splunkd to a variety of different ports, no difference
• I've checked my local firewall, there are no rules which could affect this
• I've tried with and without SSL
• I've restarted several times
• Splunk says the http port is open during startup
• There's nothing else on the ports I've tried

All I've done for this to happen is run something on the same port, but that should have stopped being an issue as soon as I stopped the other listener, or certainly after having changed Splunk to different ports.

[dwood023 · Accepted solution]

Fixed it, I checked web_service.log and found python syntax errors - I forgot I had previously changed my python env variables to a Python 3 installation, the webserver was trying to run Python 2 with that Python 3 interpreter and failed to start as a result.