Apachectl

Apachectl allows control over the httpd daemon.

Usage

(this is not exhaustive, please see the apachectl man page.

# apachectl start - starts httpd. Normally this would go somewhere in your initialisation scripts.

# apachectl stop - stops httpd. You might need this if you get runaway processes, or if someone is trying to DDoS you; or if you plan to do a lot of web server maintenance.

# apachectl restart - restarts httpd and re-reads the configuration. (This actually just sends SIGHUP to the main process; SIGHUP is often used to instruct daemons to restart themselves. You can use kill -HUP as an alternative, if you really want.)

# apachectl graceful - this does a "graceful restart", allowing any transfers in progress to complete, but still re-reads the configuration and applies it to future transfers. (This uses SIGUSR1.) Use this after editing the configuration.

# apachectl configtest - checks the configuration file for anything that would cause httpd to fail. Use this after editing the configuration and before restarting httpd. Note: this only proves that the file makes sense to httpd; it does not necessarily mean that it does exactly what you were expecting.

External links

• Project homepage (httpd.apache.org)