How do I restart nginx only after the configuration test was successful on Ubuntu?
When I restart the nginx service on a command line on an Ubuntu server, the service crashes when a nginx configuration file has errors. On a multi-site server this puts down all the sites, even the ones without configuration errors.
To prevent this, I run the nginx configuration test first:
nginx -t
After the test ran successful, I could restart the service:
/etc/init.d/nginx restart
Or only reload the nignx site configs without a restart:
nginx -s reload
Is there a way to combine those two commands where the restart command is conditional to the configuration test's result?
I couldn't find this online and the official documentation on this is rather basic. I don't know my way around Linux that well, so I don't know if what I'm looking for is right in front of me or not possible at all.
I'm using nginx v1.1.19.
Answer
As of nginx 1.8.0, the correct solution is
sudo nginx -t && sudo service nginx reload
Note that due to a bug, configtest always returns a zero exit code even if the config file has an error.