Reloading the server configuration files

Some PostgreSQL configuration parameters can only be changed by reloading the entire configuration files. Note that in some cloud-based database services, this occurs automatically when parameters are changed, so this is not relevant.

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, especially the Starting the database server manually recipe. More details are provided there, such as the exact names of the 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...