Stopping and Restarting Apache
In order to stop or restart Apache, you must send a signal to the running httpd processes. There are two ways to send the signals. First, you can use the unix kill command to directly send signals to the processes. You will notice many httpd executables running on your system, but you should not send signals to any of them except the parent, whose pid is in the PidFile. That is to say you shouldn’t ever need to send signals to any process except the parent. There are three signals that you can send the parent: TERM, HUP, and USR1, which will be described in a moment.
To send a signal to the parent you should issue a command such as:
The USR1 or graceful signal causes the parent process to advise the children to exit after their current request (or to exit immediately if they’re not serving anything).
Sending the HUP or restart signal to the parent causes it to kill off its children like in TERM, but the parent doesn’t exit. It re-reads its configuration files, and re-opens any log files. Then it spawns a new set of children and continues serving hits.
Signal: HUP
Note: Before doing a restart, you can check the syntax of the configuration files with the -t command line argument.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
