Bug#895237: apache2: apachectl does not use systemd for restarts

[Stefan Fritsch <sf@sfritsch.de>]

On Thursday, 12 April 2018 11:56:04 CEST Axel Beckert wrote:
> Jan Heitkötter wrote:
> > Default behaviour is do stop/start Apache using apachectl which fails in
> > installations running systemd. Apache will stop, but not start again.

Using apachectl stop / start / restart works fine for me with systemd. The 
issue is somewhere else.

To debug this, error output would be useful. Like what happens when you try to 
start apache again? what does systemctl status apache2.service say afterwards? 
Is there anything in the apache error log? Maybe change apache2ctl to do "set 
-x" at the beginning and show the output.


Harlan Lieberman-Berg wrote:
> Hm, looks like this is actually a bug over in apache-land.  We do the right
> thing for `apachectl start` in terms of wrapping to use systemd, but we
> don't do that during `apachectl restart`.

This is correct behavior: apachectl restart is different from stop+start. 
"apachectl restart" only restarts the child processes, the parent process 
keeps running.
This is different from what init scripts do for "restart", but nobody claims 
that apachectl works the same as init scripts.

But I wonder why certbot needs to do stop+start? Would an "apachectl graceful" 
not be the better option?

> Apache folx, can we potentially just turn restart into a shim that calls
> `apachectl stop` and `apachectl start`?  That will solve the problem with
> the least amount of fuss.