How to restart Postgresql

Question

Try this as root (maybe you can use sudo or su):

/etc/init.d/postgresql restart

Without any argument the script also gives you a hint on how to restart a specific version

[Uqbar@Feynman ~] /etc/init.d/postgresql
Usage: /etc/init.d/postgresql {start|stop|restart|reload|force-reload|status} [version ...]

Similarly, in case you have it, you can also use the service tool:

[Uqbar@Feynman ~] service postgresql
Usage: /etc/init.d/postgresql {start|stop|restart|reload|force reload|status} [version ...]

Please, pay attention to the optional [version ...] trailing argument. That's meant to allow you, the user, to act on a specific version, in case you were running multiple ones. So you can restart version X while keeping version Y and Z untouched and running.

Finally, in case you are running systemd, then you can use systemctl like this:

[Uqbar@Feynman ~] systemctl status postgresql
● postgresql.service - PostgreSQL database server
   Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/postgresql.service; enabled; vendor preset: disabled)
   Active: active (running) since Wed 2017-11-14 12:33:35 CET; 7min ago
...

You can replace status with stop, start or restart as well as other actions. Please refer to the documentation for full details. In order to operate on multiple concurrent versions, the syntax is slightly different. For example to stop v12 and reload v13 you can run:

systemctl stop postgresql-12.service
systemctl reload postgresql-13.service

Thanks to @Jojo for pointing me to this very one. Finally Keep in mind that root permissions may be needed for non-informative tasks as in the other cases seen earlier.

You can also restart postgresql by using this command, should work on both the versions:

sudo service postgresql restart

On Windows :

1-Open Run Window by Winkey + R

2-Type services.msc

3-Search Postgres service based on version installed.

4-Click stop, start or restart the service option.

On Linux :

sudo systemctl restart postgresql

also instead of "restart" you can replace : status, stop or status.

This should work:

sudo systemctl stop postgresql

sudo systemctl start postgresql

The right way to restart postgres server is to use

pg_ctl restart -D /home/postgres/postgresdbdata/

pg_ctl is usually found in location usr/local/pgsql/bin/pg_ctl if u dont have it added to your path.

Documentation can be found here https://www.postgresql.org/docs/13/app-pg-ctl.html This has more details on Start,Stop,Restart,etc of the postgres server.

You can firstly check for the postgress process running

ps -ef | grep post

You might need to use (post|pg) on the grep side, to discover the process for the Postgres service running on your machine, it might depend on your OS.

And you can just kill the child process since most of this process should restart automatically.

sudo kill $pid_of_the_child_process