[nwellinghoff]

You can use a switch to start the nginx process and tell it to stop accepting new connections on the old one without killing it. Forgot the switch but its in the docs. Don’t know if this is well known but this is how I made a poor mans dynamically configurable nginx like 7 years ago using the free version. It worked great

[remram]

I think this is known, and the Kubernetes Ingress Controller leverages this, however you are leaving that other process behind until connections drain. If you are changing configurations often enough, you might have many old processes lying around, consuming resources and using old settings. So it's not ideal.

[infensus]

Reload signal?

> Once the master process receives the signal to reload configuration, it checks the syntax validity of the new configuration file and tries to apply the configuration provided in it. If this is a success, the master process starts new worker processes and sends messages to old worker processes, requesting them to shut down. Otherwise, the master process rolls back the changes and continues to work with the old configuration. Old worker processes, receiving a command to shut down, stop accepting new connections and continue to service current requests until all such requests are serviced. After that, the old worker processes exit.

http://nginx.org/en/docs/beginners_guide.html#control