How to Stop, Start or Restart Plone/Zope Instance

The following Plone Tutorial applies to Plone 4, Plone 3, and Plone 2.

You may need to interfere into your Zope instance work due to a number of reasons: you might have to install a new product, you might need to fix some problems, you might get "Error 503 - Service Temporarily Unavailable", which usually happens when your site is served by a long-running process behind Apache (Rails, Django, Zope, ...), but this long-running process is down. You can usually fix such issues by restarting your long-running process.

Reasons why your long-running process might be down include:

a bug in your code and as a result your process crash
your process used too much memory and it got killed by memory watchdog
We rebooted the server and your process didn't get restarted

You can control your Zope instance uptime in a number of ways: via SSH, via Plone, or via ZMI.

1. SSH

To control Zope instance via SSH connection, you first of all need to get your SSH login/password by loging in to Quintagroup Plone hosting account. After that login to your Zope Instance with SSH login/password you just got: in Windows use WinSCP program, in Linux - use Krusader or Konsole.

Next steps depend on whether your Zope Instance is a usual Zope instance or it was created with buildout. After you access your Zope instance, get to data1 folder that is usually located in the root of your account. Depending on what items are in data1 folder, you may know whether your Zope instance is:

A. Ordinary Zope Instance

In case your instance is an ordinary Zope instance - its contents will be the following:
usual-instance

open data1/bin folder of Zope your instance
```
cd data1/bin 
```
type one of the following commands to stop, start, or restart your Zope instance
```
./zopectl stop
./zopectl start
./zopectl restart
```

B. Buildout-based Zope Instance

In case your instance was created with buildout - it includes buildout.cfg file:

open data1/bin folder of Zope your instance
```
cd data1/bin 
```
type one of the following commands to stop, start, or restart your zope instance
```
./instance stop
./instance start
./instance restart
```

2. Plone

You can control your Zope instance at Maintenance control panel:

Go to Site Setup
Select Maintenance item among other Site Setup items
Control Zope Server uptime by pressing Shut down and Restart buttons.

3. ZMI

You can also control Zope Server work through Zope Management Interface.

Select Control_Panel
Use Restart and Shutdown buttons