apachectl restart is fine, but apachectl reload, apachectl graceful, etc. will not restart apache after stopping. It’s a bug that occurs when using opcache with mod_php.
I noticed that Apache “somehow” stopped every morning after upgrading freeBSD 13. I checked the time when it stopped, and found that it stopped when the log was rotated by “newsyslog” and when the certbot of “let’sencrypt” runs.
In “newsyslog”, the restart is done by sending a signal (30 SIGUSR1) to httpd.pid, and it seems that apachectl internally operates in the same way by sending a signal. After much Googling, I found the following bug report.
https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=268318
I had no choice but to remove “/var/run/httpd.pid 30”, which is the part of the “newsyslog” configuration, and set the cron to hit the following command after “newsyslog” was run.
/usr/local/etc/rc.d/apache24 gracefulstop && /usr/local/etc/rc.d/apache24 start
I’m sure there are many ways to deal with this, but I decided to use the above temporary solution as a stopgap until the bug is fixed.
The certbot command was also changed to the above in the post-hook section.
I think FreeBSD Apache is the fastest for displaying websites, but the support period is too short, and if you leave it until the last minute, you will have to upgrade the OS every 3 months. It should be like ubuntu with 5 years free support and 10 years paid support.