How to restart NGINX on Linux

NGINX is a popular web hosting and reverse proxy software for Linux systems. Like many other applications and services, it occasionally needs to be restarted. Restarting is especially common when updates are made to configuration files. You will always need to restart or reload NGINX for changes to take effect.

In this article, we will go over a couple of different command line options to restart and reload an NGINX server. Additionally, you will learn how to check the NGINX configuration file for errors before restarting NGINX. After all, you don't want to load a configuration that contains errors.

In this tutorial you will learn:

• How to do a NGINX reload (no effect on client connections)
• How to fully restart NGINX

Using systemctl, there are two different options to restart NGINX:

• reload - reloads the configuration file but does not fully exit NGINX or close current connections
• restart - fully restarts NGINX, which also closes connections and reloads the configuration file

Those commands will also check the configuration file for errors and alert you if they are found, but in a production environment it is always a good idea to check the configuration file for possible syntax errors before reloading or restarting NGINX.

Use the following command in the terminal to do that:

$ sudo nginx -t
nginx: the configuration file /etc/nginx/nginx.conf syntax is ok
nginx: configuration file /etc/nginx/nginx.conf test is successful

$ sudo systemctl reload nginx

$ sudo systemctl restart nginx

$ sudo systemctl status nginx