How to restart nginx on OS X - macos

Question

I'm using nginx on OS X 10.8. Freshly installed nginx but can't find a way to restart nginx except kill nginx_pid say kill 64116. Wondering if there are better ways to restart nginx.
Found some methods on Google and SO but didn't work:
nginx -s restart
sudo fuser -k 80/tcp ; sudo /etc/init.d/nginx restart
The error message for nginx -s restart is
nginx: [error] open() "/usr/local/var/run/nginx.pid" failed (2: No such file or directory)
Sometimes also get this error msg:
nginx: invalid option: "-s restart"

Answer 1

Try running sudo nginx before starting nginx.

Answer 2

To reload config files:
sudo nginx -s reload
To fully restart nginx:
sudo nginx -s quit
sudo nginx
Details
There is no restart signal for nginx. From the docs, here are the signals that the master process accepts:
SIGINT, SIGTERM Shut down quickly.
SIGHUP Reload configuration, start the new worker process with a new configuration, and gracefully shut down old worker processes.
SIGQUIT Shut down gracefully.
SIGUSR1 Reopen log files.
SIGUSR2 Upgrade the nginx executable on the fly.
SIGWINCH Shut down worker processes gracefully.
Presumably you could send these signals to the process id manually, but the nginx command has the flag nginx -s <signal> that sends signals to the master process for you. Your options are:
stop SIGTERM
quit SIGQUIT
reopen SIGUSR1
reload SIGHUP
No need to futz with the pid manually.
Edit: just realized much of this info was already in comments on the other answers. Leaving this here anyway to summarize the situation.

Answer 3

What is your nginx pid file location? This is specified in the configuration file, default paths specified compile-time in the config script. You can search for it as such:
find / -name nginx.pid 2>/dev/null (must issue while nginx is running)
Solution:
sudo mkdir -p /usr/local/var/run/
ln -s /current/path/to/pid/file /usr/local/var/run/nginx.pid

Answer 4

$ sudo nginx -c /usr/local/etc/nginx/nginx.conf
$ sudo nginx -s reload
Source Link: https://blog.csdn.net/github_33644920/article/details/51733436

Answer 5

Try this:
sudo nginx -s stop
followed by a:
sudo nginx
It seems that nginx keeps track of its state, to if you stop it twice, it will complain. But the above worked for me.

Answer 6

I do it like this:
First kill the progress
ps aux | grep nginx
kill -9 {pid}
Then start nginx
nginx
It works!

Answer 7

As a future resource, you can consult http://wiki.nginx.org/CommandLine
Nginx probably runs as root, so you will need to run a variant of the following command to affect it.
sudo nginx -s stop | reload | quit | reopen
There is usually not much reason to restart Nginx like Apache would need. If you have modified a configuration file, you may just want to the reload option.

Answer 8

check if this directory exists:
/usr/local/var/run
this error can occurs when nginx try to initialise pid file in
localisation that doesn't exist.

Answer 9

There is a bug here. Depending on whether nginx is running while you modify/restart apache and/or modify nginx configs it is possible for this file (which is essentially just a process ID pointer) to be destroyed.
When you attempt to send any signal to nginx like
nginx -s quit;
nginx -s stop;
nginx -s reload;
nginx uses this file to reference the ID of the process to which it needs to send the signal. If the file isn't there the link between the active running process of nginx & the cli app is effectively broken.
I actually ended up in a state where two nginx processes were running simultaneously so killed both.
To work around this, you can either Force the termination of existing nginx processes via Activity Monitor (then run nginx & have the cli app create a new nginx.pid file) or if you REALLY need to keep nginx running but want to run nginx -s reload - manually create a file in the /run path called nginx.pid and insert the PID of the currently running nginx processs (obtained via Activity Monitor).

Answer 10

To reload the custom config file use
nginx -s reload -c /etc/nginx/conf.d/<config file>.conf

Answer 11

This could simply mean that nginx is already stopped - not running at the moment.
First, confirm whether nginx is running, execute:
$ ps aux | grep nginx

Answer 12

i got the same error link you, i tried many way to fix it but it not working
after that i run the command line and it work well:
nginx -c /usr/local/etc/nginx/nginx.conf
the information i got from here
https://blog.csdn.net/wn1245343496/article/details/77974756

Answer 13

One way to stop or reload is through the below command,
For stop:
sudo /usr/local/nginx/sbin/nginx -s stop
Run reload only if the nginx is running:
sudo /usr/local/nginx/sbin/nginx -s reload
By doing like the above, you wont get nginx: [error] open() "/usr/local/var/run/nginx.pid" this issue