[kennu]

In Puppet you can specify dependencies between Services and Files, so that a service is automatically restarted when a file changes.

The only trick is that Puppet must be aware of the file change. This happens automatically when the file is modified by Puppet. But if it's modified externally by a shell script or a git pull, you need to have Puppet copy that file to another "dummy" file, so it can detect that it changed from the previous version and trigger the restart.

What a "service restart" means can also be configured if you want a SIGHUP or something else. The default is the equivalent of "/etc/init.d/nginx restart".