How to start and stop service on Ubuntu

If you are ubuntu newbie, you probably didn't know how to start, stop, and restart a service on ubuntu, plus how to see the status of the service itself. Don't worry, i'm here to help you with that.

There is a command line tool for start, stop, restart, and also showing the status of a service, the tool is called 'service' and you need to run it with 'sudo' command.

A service is a program that runs on the background process (people also called it 'daemon'), for example apache web server, nginx web server, mysql database server, elasticsearch server, and so on.

How to start a service on ubuntu

sudo service [name] start

Example :

sudo service mysql start

sudo service apache2 start

How to stop a service on ubuntu

sudo service [name] stop

Example:

sudo service mysql stop

sudo service apache2 stop

How to restart a service on ubuntu

sudo service [name] restart

Example :

sudo service msyql restart

sudo service apache2 restart

How to show status of service on ubuntu

sudo service [name] status

Example:

sudo service mysql status

sudo service apache2 status

Alternatively, you can also call directly the binary of the service/daemon itself, which usually stored on /etc/init.d/, this is what people used to do back in the old days.

sudo /etc/init.d/mysql start

sudo /etc/init.d/mysql stop

sudo /etc/init.d/mysql restart

sudo /etc/init.d/mysql status