What does ./build rewrite confs do?

I'm in a spot where after I upgrade Apache to 2.4.25 it continues to have problems with being unresponsive. I've done a ton of changes to the configurations and done many build option changes. Everything worked perfect under 2.4.23 but even after a build downgrade the problems persist.

So it looks like I'm going to have to do a full ./build all and a ./build rewrite_confs. However, I want to make sure that some important custom changes don't get overwritten.

Since I run nginx_apache I see an nginx_reverse in the custombuild/custom/ directory which only has nginx configurations.

Do I need to add into the custombuild/custom/ directory the regular /nginx confs and ap2/ confs?

Last time I ran a rewrite_confs I spent a full day fixing up a lot of broken services because all my custom edits were undone. I want to prevent that, but I need to fix my broken Apache.

As long as you placed all your custom changes in the custombuild/custom/ directory a rewrite_confs won't mess it up. If you directly modified config files then they can be replaced by a rewrite_confs. I see people here mentioning direct edits on config files way too often (or sometimes, followed by a chattr +i) which is why it's such common issue. Just use the custom/ directory and it'll be a lot more maintainable and you'll know what to expect.

Personally, whenever I have to change stuff in the configs of DirectAdmin services / templates I always follow it up by a rewrite_confs and a ./build <service> to confirm that there will not be any changes that are being overwritten unexpectedly during updates.