Signals

Command Line

On Unix systems, the NATS server responds to the following signals:

Signal	Result
SIGKILL	Kills the process immediately
SIGQUIT	Kills the process immediately and performs a core dump
SIGINT	Stops the server gracefully
SIGTERM	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 --signal/-sl flag. It supports the following commands:

Command	Signal
stop	SIGKILL
quit	SIGINT
term	SIGTERM
reopen	SIGUSR1
reload	SIGHUP
ldm	SIGUSR2

Quit the server

nats-server --signal quit

Stop the server

nats-server --signal stop

Lame duck mode the server

nats-server --signal ldm

Reopen log file for log rotation

nats-server --signal reopen

Reload server configuration

nats-server --signal reload

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.