Process Signaling
On Unix systems, the NATS server responds to the following signals:
| Signal | Result |
|---|---|
| SIGKILL | Kills the process immediately |
| SIGINT | Stops the server gracefully |
| SIGUSR1 | Reopens the log file for log rotation |
| SIGHUP | Reloads server configuration file |
| SIGUSR2 | Stops the server after evicting all clients (lame duck mode) |
The nats-server binary can be used to send these signals to running NATS servers using the -sl flag:
# Quit the server
nats-server -sl quit
# Stop the server
nats-server -sl stop
# Reopen log file for log rotation
nats-server -sl reopen
# Reload server configuration
nats-server -sl reload
# Lame duck mode server configuration
nats-server -sl ldm
If there are multiple nats-server processes running, or if pgrep isn't available, you must either specify a PID or the absolute path to a PID file:
nats-server -sl stop=<pid>
nats-server -sl stop=/path/to/pidfile
See the Windows Service section for information on signaling the NATS server on Windows.