Reloading the server configuration files

Some PostgreSQL configuration parameters can be changed only by reloading the entire configuration files.

How to do it…

There are two variants of this recipe, depending on whether you are using systemd. This is similar to the previous recipes in this chapter, and especially the Starting the database server manually recipe. More details are explained there, such as the exact names of systemd service units depending on which database server you want to reload, and which GNU/Linux distribution you are working on.

With systemd, configuration files can be reloaded with the following syntax:

sudo systemctl reload SERVICEUNIT

Here, SERVICEUNIT must be replaced with the exact name of the systemd service unit for the server(s) that you want to reload.

Otherwise, on each platform, there is a specific command to reload the server without using systemd. All of these are listed as follows:

• On Ubuntu and Debian, you can issue the following:

pg_ctlcluster 11 main reload...