How to: Reload your NginX Configuration

How to: Reload your NginX Configuration

Sometimes when working with NginX you come across the need to reload your configuration for the changes made to your .conf files take place. Although this is a simple task some considerations and best practices should be followed for optimal results:

1. Verify that your configuration files “compile”. Execute nginx -t to test that the .conf files are well formatted, the syntax is correct and the directives were allowed. If you don’t do this and try to reload the configuration it would either result on no configuration to be loaded or your previous configuration to remain there and hence the changes you made are not applied.
2. Run service nginx reload or /etc/init.d/nginx reload

What this is going to do is effectively reload your configuration. Worker processes that are active will keep the old configuration until they become free while available ones will stop and restart with the new configuration. This is a very smooth way to make a change to the configuration without having some downtime from restarting the NginX server.

As mentioned above ALWAYS check the configuration files at least load. If you did a service stop you couldn’t start back up until you had fixed the issues in your configuration files and that could result in significant downtime.