How safe is it to restart the machine while Ghost is running?

Developer help
1

Hello!

I’m self-hosting a Ghost blog on a DigitalOcean droplet (a preconfigured one, on Ubuntu 18.04.5). I’ve taken a lot of steps to minimize the amount of maintenance required. One of them is doing unattended-upgrades. However, some upgrades require that the server is restarted. I’ve chosen to just have it email me when that needs to be done; at the moment I just ssh into it when I get an email, do ghost stop, and reboot (ghost restarts by itself after the reboot).

So what I was wondering is if I can also skip that. If someone is more familiar with the way Linux shuts down and how that affects a running ghost server, I’d like to learn more. I assume that when shutting down, a SIGINT or something like that is sent to Ghost? How safe would it be to just allow unattended-upgrades to restart the machine when it needs to?

If it’s not safe, then I see ghost stop does
sudo systemctl is-active ghost_IP
sudo systemctl stop ghost_IP

So is there a way to configure unattended-upgrades to run this every time before restarting the server?

I’m running Ghost v3.1.1, and I’ll upgrade as soon as I get the chance. I just assumed the answer wouldn’t depend on the version.

2

You should be fine restarting without explicitly shutting Ghost down since systemd should handle shutting it down the same way you’re manually doing it :slight_smile: