Nginx PID file missing

[Maxim Dounin]

Hello!

On Wed, May 24, 2017 at 08:43:20AM -0400, shivramg94 wrote:

> In our environments we are intermittently facing an issue where the
> nginx.pid file goes missing, due to which whenever we try to do a reload of
> nginx, it fails saying "no pid file exists". Is there any known scenarios
> due to which the nginx.pid file goes missing?
> 
> Does the nginx reload has any effect on the pid file? Ideally it should not,
> isn't ?
> 
> Also, what we have noticed is, sometimes whenever we tried to do a restart
> of nginx, i.e quit nginx and then start it again, at times, the nginx master
> and worker processes start but there is no pidfile written by nginx at the
> expected location?
> 
> Could anyone help on this issue?

PID file is removed when nginx stops.  If you stop nginx, and 
start another instance without waiting for the previous instance 
to stop, you may end up with new pid removed by the previous nginx 
instance.  Make sure to actually stop nginx before trying to start 
it again.

-- 
Maxim Dounin
http://nginx.org/