How to Restart a Service Automatically with a Cron Job

Sometimes you want a service restarted on a schedule - for example PHP-FPM every night, or a Node.js app that slowly leaks memory. In OpenPanel you can do this with a regular cron job, no terminal access needed.

How It Works​

Every service in your OpenPanel account (web server, PHP, MySQL, Redis, your apps, ...) runs in its own container with a restart policy. When the container's main process stops, the container is started again automatically.

The main process of a container always has the process ID 1. So to restart a service, a cron job only needs to stop PID 1 inside that container:

kill 1

The service shuts down and comes straight back up a moment later.

Create the Cron Job​

1. Go to OpenPanel → Cron Jobs and click Create New.
2. Container: select the service you want to restart, e.g. php-fpm-8.3, nginx, mysql or your app's container.
3. Schedule: choose when it should run, e.g. Daily, or a cron expression like 0 0 4 * * * for every day at 04:00 (OpenPanel cron schedules have 6 fields - the first one is seconds).
4. Command:

kill 1

5. Save.

Use the Run button next to the job to test it right away - the service should restart within a few seconds.

See Cron Jobs for all options.

kill 1 or kill -9 1?​

Prefer kill 1, especially for MySQL/MariaDB and PostgreSQL - a forced stop can interrupt writes.

Tips​

• Schedule restarts at a quiet time, such as early morning - visitors get an error for the few seconds the service is down.
• Restarting a web server or PHP container briefly takes all sites that use it offline, not just one site.
• A service you stopped manually from the Services page stays stopped - the restart policy only brings back services that stopped on their own.
• If a service needs regular restarts because it runs out of memory, consider raising its limits instead - see Services.

Related​

• Cron Jobs
• Cron troubleshooting guide
• How to troubleshoot services