A better way to restart/reload Gunicorn (via Upstart) after 'git pull'ing my Django projects

You can tell Gunicorn to reload gracefully using the HUP signal like so:

kill -HUP <pid>

(see the FAQ for details)

I use Supervisor to control my Gunicorn server, which allows me to use this (slightly hacky) way of reloading Gunicorn after a deploy:

supervisorctl status gunicorn | sed "s/.*[pid ]\([0-9]\+\)\,.*/\1/" | xargs kill -HUP

You could obviously achieve something similar with pidof, or ps.

This is actually run from a Fabric script, so I don't even have to logon to the server at all.

For those not using supervisord: what Rob said, it works with ps as well,

ps aux |grep gunicorn |grep projectname | awk '{ print $2 }' |xargs kill -HUP

For a graceful reload, you should instead use Upstart's reload command, e.g.:

sudo reload jobname

According to the initctl (Upstart) manpage, reload will send a HUP signal to the process:

reload JOB [KEY=VALUE]...

       Sends the SIGHUP signal to running process of the named JOB instance.

...which for Gunicorn will trigger a graceful restart (see FAQ).