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Don Kirkby
Asked: 2009-09-02 16:22:35 +0800 CST

Reloading PostgreSQL after configuration changes

  • 772

I've made some changes to pg_hba.conf and I want them to take affect. I've found several places where people say that I can tell PostgreSQL to reload, but there are several different techniques listed, and none of them work for me yet.

The most authoritative reference I've found is for the pg_ctl command, but I'm not sure where my PGDATA folder is. I'll keep looking.

I'm running PostgreSQL 8.3 on Ubuntu 8.10.

ubuntu

11 Answers

  1. Though the original person asking the question implied he's running Ubuntu 8.10 many people, using later versions of Ubuntu might stumble here as well. And this might in fact work with 8.10 too. I dunno, I don't have any 8.10 installations to try it with..

    Ok, lets cut to the point. So the cool "new" way of controlling services is to use the service command. So you can reload configs with the following command:

    service postgresql-8.3 reload

    naturally you need to have the proper rights so it is most likely required to prepend the command with something like sudo or su -c root like this:

    sudo service postgresql-8.3 reload
    or
    su -c root 'service postgresql-8.3 reload'

    P.S. It is suggested in the Ubuntu documentation that something relating to this new method had been done way back there with the release of 6.10, however if I've understood it correctly it had not been taken into more general use until 9.10.

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  2. Best Answer

    You can check where your PGDATA is by connecting to pg, and issuing command:

    show data_directory;

    On ubuntu, it's usually /var/lib/postgresql/8.3/main/.

    Also, you can: /etc/init.d/postgresql-8.3 reload

    • 18

  3. Option 1: From the command-line shell

    su - postgres
/usr/bin/pg_ctl reload

    Option 2: Using SQL

    SELECT pg_reload_conf();

    Using either option will not interrupt any active queries or connections to the database, thus applying these changes seemlessly.

    • 11

  4. This will do the trick:

    kill -HUP $(head -1 $PGDATA/postmaster.pid)
    • 4

  5. If you don't want to restart the server and just send a signal to postgreSQL, just type command:
    pg_ctl reload

    • 3

  6. I finally found a technique that works for me from this article. The command is:

    sudo invoke-rc.d postgresql-8.3 reload

    I'd still appreciate feedback on what the recommended technique is.

    • 2

  7. The following should do it for you:

    sudo /etc/init.d/postgresql-8.3 reload
    • 2

  8. On a modern linux disto with systemd, I had to use systemctl to restart postgres. Here's what worked on CentOS7:

    First find the precise name of the current Postgres service:

    systemctl | grep postgres

    Results are:

    postgresql-10.service                                                                                 
loaded active     running      PostgreSQL 10 database server

    Then use that name to restart Postgres:

    sudo systemctl restart postgresql-10.service
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  9. I just used:

    /etc/init.d/postgresql reload
    • 1

  10. On Debian/Ubuntu/etc. versions using systemd:

    systemctl reload postgresql

    or

    sudo systemctl reload postgresql

    On other systems, this should do:

    su -c "pg_ctl reload" - postgres
    • 0