A Windows app to shut down Apache?

Saturday, November 22, 2008 by Dave Winer.

I need an app I can launch from a script that reliably shuts down Apache. Pretty sure I can relaunch it without too much trouble. I don't care what language as long as its an exe I can just run. I can try to debug a pair of batch scripts but that approach always takes a few hours for me.  

I need to do it for a couple of reasons... 

1. I want to change some of Apache's conf files and have the changes reflected. 

2. I want to rollover the log files and have to do it when Apache is not running. 

There may be some other reasons to want to temporarily shut down Apache under code control. 

I posted a tweet about this and got back a ton of questions, so I realized that I'd better put up a blog post. With 13K-plus followers most of them can't see each other so my responses would make no sense to most of them, then I get questions asking me to explain what I'm responding to, and you can see this quickly cascades out of control (one of the reasons I say Twitter is no good for conversation, of course y'll all flame me for that one heh).