How do I restart nginx only after the configuration test was successful on Ubuntu?

As of nginx 1.8.0, the correct solution is

sudo nginx -t && sudo service nginx reload

Note that due to a bug, configtest always returns a zero exit code even if the config file has an error.

Actually, as far as I know, nginx would show an empty message and it wouldn't actually restart if the configuration is bad.

The only way to screw it up is by doing an nginx stop and then start again. It would succeed to stop, but fail to start.

I use the following command to reload Nginx (version 1.5.9) only if a configuration test was successful:

/etc/init.d/nginx configtest && sudo /etc/init.d/nginx reload

If you need to do this often, you may want to use an alias. I use the following:

alias n='/etc/init.d/nginx configtest && sudo /etc/init.d/nginx reload'

The trick here is done by the "&&" which only executes the second command if the first was successful. You can see here a more detailed explanation of the use of the "&&" operator.

You can use "restart" instead of "reload" if you really want to restart the server.