nats.docs/nats_server/signals.md

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.