Error while installing Apache; error is "E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)"

Question

I followed an online article to remove my Apache from my system.
I removed Apache through these commands

sudo apt-get purge apache2 apache2-utils
sudo rm -rf /etc/apache2-bin
sudo apt-get autoremove

Then in the article they mentioned to remove the files and directories of the results of whereis apache2.

After running the command whereis apache2 I found

/usr/sbin/apache2/usr/share/apache2
/usr/lib/apache2
/usr/share/man/man8/apache2.8.gz
/etc/apache2

I removed the above directories and files through command sudo rm -rf file_or_directory_name.

Then I tried

sudo apt-get install apache2

I clicked 'y' when the system asked do you want to continue?.

Then the error came:

Setting up apache2 (2.4.7-1ubuntu4.4) ...
cp: cannot stat ‘/usr/share/apache2/default-site/index.html’: No such file or directory
dpkg: error processing package apache2 (--configure): subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit status 1
Errors were encountered while processing:  apache2 E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

I tried sudo apt-get install apache2 again after running the sudo apt-get update command, but still got the same error results.

Answer 1

To recover /usr/share/apache2/default-site/index.html you need to re-install apache2-data. Given your current situation, try

sudo apt-get purge apache2-data
sudo apt-get install apache2

Presumably your system ended up in that state because apt-get autoremove didn't uninstall apache2-data, but your rm -rf removed the files it contained. Then apt-get install apache2 would reckon that apache2-data was still installed and didn't need to be re-installed, but its files were gone...

Answer 2

sudo apt-get purge apache2 apache2-utils apache2.2-bin apache2-common

sudo apt-get --purge remove apache2

sudo apt-get autoremove --purge

sudo apt-get purge apache2-data

install

sudo apt-get install apache2