Signals

Command Line

On Unix systems, the NATS server responds to the following signals. You can send these using the standard Unix kill command, or use the nats-server --signal command for convenience.

nats-server command	Unix Signal	Description
--signal ldm	SIGUSR2	Graceful shutdown (evicts clients gradually) (lame duck mode)
--signal quit	SIGINT	Stops the server gracefully
--signal term	SIGTERM	Stops the server gracefully
--signal stop	SIGKILL	Kills the process immediately
--signal reload	SIGHUP	Reloads server configuration file
--signal reopen	SIGUSR1	Reopens the log file for log rotation
(kill only)	SIGQUIT	Kills the process immediately and performs a stack dump

Usage

To send a signal to a running nats-server:

nats-server --signal <command>

For example, to gracefully stop the server with lame duck mode:

nats-server --signal ldm

Multiple processes

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 --signal stop=<pid>

nats-server --signal stop=/path/to/pidfile

As of NATS v2.10.0, a glob expression can be used to match one or more process IDs, such as:

nats-server --signal ldm=12*

Windows

See the Windows Service section for information on signaling the NATS server on Windows.