Restarting nginx

A quick how to on restarting nginx when init scripts or start scripts aren’t available. These aren’t added by default as far as I know.

This is done by sending the correct signal to nginx. The pid of nginx can be found at /opt/nginx/logs/nginx.pid. Although this may vary depending on where nginx is installed and how it was configured. Let’s now say the pid was 12345 execute the following command…

sudo kill -s HUP 12345

Where HUP is the hangup signal. You can see the nginx wiki for signals that can be sent to nginx.

The wiki states the HUP signal 1. Reloads config; 2. Start the new worker processes with a new configuration; 3. Gracefully shutdown the old worker processes.