Restart Apache after PHP update?

Question

One of our Amazon Linux servers has php56 installed, which is not the default PHP installation. Quite often I see updates for this package, while on other server PHP is not updated.

Do I need to restart the HTTPD service after updating php56?

Solution

You do not need to restart apache, but you need to tell it to reload its configuration. I am not sure which command centos uses to start/stop/reload daemons.

On centos the command should be:

sudo service httpd graceful

On a linux that uses systemd the command would be:

sudo systemctl reload apache2

On debian it would be:

sudo apache2ctl graceful

Comments

[muru]

Are you using Apache's PHP module, or PHP-FPM?

[SPRBRN]

We're using the Apache PHP module.

[SPRBRN]

I don't see a reload option. When I try sudo apachectl reload it displays the help info for httpd. In the end I restarted: sudo service httpd graceful.

[Thawn]

thanks SPRBRN, I fixed the command accordingly :). Actually, graceful on centos should do exactly the same thing as reload on other distros