attempt to restart/stop yaws failed

I’ve got yaws (git hash 5f35f5b7451ea4388c53df9f4e00caad0caa6b45) running on CentOS 5.3.  I just added a virtual host entry in yaws.conf and tried to restart yaws, but the restart failed:

[me@mymachine /]$ sudo etc/init.d/yaws restart Stopping yaws:                                             [FAILED]

After hunting around a bit, it seems yaws will fail to restart (and stop) if the docroot doesn’t point to an actual directory.  In my case, I added the virtual host entry before actually creating the docroot directory.  Making the directory fixed the problem.