Apache HTTP Server Version 2.4
Apache HTTP Server Version 2.4
This document covers stopping and restarting Apache HTTP Server on Unix-like systems. Windows NT, 2000 and XP users should see Running httpd as a Service and Windows 9x and ME users should see Running httpd as a Console Application for information on how to control httpd on those platforms.
In order to stop or restart the Apache HTTP Server, 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 four signals that you can send the parent:
TERM,
USR1,
HUP, and
WINCH, which
will be described in a moment.
To send a signal to the parent you should issue a command such as:
kill -TERM `cat /usr/local/apache2/logs/httpd.pid`
The second method of signaling the httpd processes
is to use the -k command line options: stop,
restart, graceful and graceful-stop,
as described below. These are arguments to the httpd binary, but we recommend that
you send them using the apachectl control script, which
will pass them through to httpd.
After you have signaled httpd, you can read about
its progress by issuing:
tail -f /usr/local/apache2/logs/error_log
Modify those examples to match your ServerRoot and PidFile settings.
apachectl -k stopSending the TERM or stop signal to
the parent causes it to immediately attempt to kill off all of its
children. It may take it several seconds to complete killing off
its children. Then the parent itself exits. Any requests in
progress are terminated, and no further requests are served.