Yes httpd is being launched through launchd, like a good little daemon.
And yeah, because Macs' internal SSDs are super-expensive per unit storage, I got the minimum 250GB and bought an external 2TB drive for 1/2 the cost of upgrading that single SSD to even 0.5TB. So of course I want to serve off the external drive.
But starting in OSX 10.14 I guess (my previous computer is still running 10.11...) Apple added some security features like requiring special permissions for programs to access resources like removable media. So there is a mechanism where you can sign an app bundle in a way that makes it give a prompt to the user to allow access to removable drives, but this mechanism doesn't exist for non-bundle things like httpd.
There is a way you can manually add access to the programs, but it's not well documented. I had to keep looking at web info and the error logs in console for the security deaemon that just said "no permission for httpd!" but it wasn't clear that I had to give the permission to the most parent process for httpd (instead of just httpd itself), which turned out to be sh for some reason.
I'm also weary because Apache doesn't tell you you
have to build against OpenSSL and can't use LibreSSL, and OSX now comes with LibreSSL by default. The worst part is it *builds* fine, but only fails at runtime because it can't find a symbol in a .dlyd. So first I had to rebuild several times (including dependencies!) just to get httpd to run with ssl in the first place, then have it work off my test folders hosted from the internal drive because those have permissions just fine thank you, only to fail when I put it where I wanted on the external drive.
Also the documentation for how to self-sign a cert is a pain because I'm not paying for a cert for my own internal network, and then Google screams that non V3 certs are security risks even when you manually add them to your trusted certs store,so you have to find tutorial number 73 to create a V3 cert that makes chrome happy. What a cluster.
I'm actually amazed the internet hasn't crumbled into a million pieces by now. It's amazing any of this crap works.
I still went Mac because I would rather pay Apple a little more than support Microsoft's terrible business schemes. I hate ads, I hate software as a service, I hate the cloud. MacOS does still give you a little more control over your computer as far as I've found. I could've tried to go Linux, but I actually have a fair amount of stuff on my old Mac and just wanted an easy port over. And that is one thing MacOS does well - their migration assistant is fantastic.
Because I was trying to host SVN over https; trying to add mod_dav_svn to the httpd that ships with OSX 10.15 would have been iffy, because they don't ship with the dev libraries against which to build SVN. AND you can't add to the folders to change it easily because of the new "system integrity protection" features. I think it can be done, but that seemed a more difficult path at the time. I will never know... as I don't plan on doing it again!