How do I Restart piHole DNS Resolver?

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1

Expected Behaviour:

pihole-FTL to restart

Actual Behaviour:

I have tried to restart pihole-FTL both with the UI (System Settings→Restart DNS Resolver) and also via the API using curl (POST "https://pi.hole:443/api/action/restartdns") using a valid sid etc. The UI gives no visible response at all however the API returns “success”.

However, looking at sudo service pihole-FTL status I do not see any indications of a restart or reload actually happened.

If I run sudo service pihole-FTL restart or sudo service pihole-FTL reload then the sudo service pihole-FTL status is updated (as I would expect).

This is on a fresh install (as of this morning) of Pihole core v6.3 running on Ubuntu 24.04.3 running on a pi4.

Please let me know what I am doing wrong here.

2

pihole-FTL is the resolver, but it is also the web server.

When you use sudo service, you actually kill and restart the entire program.

When you use the web interface command, only the resolver is restarted. You can see the restart on FTL.log:

2025-12-23 11:39:40.731 -03 [201/T3808] INFO: Restarting FTL: API action request
2025-12-23 11:39:40.732 -03 [201M] INFO: Asked to terminate by "/usr/bin/pihole-FTL no-daemon" (PID 201, user pihole UID 1000)
2025-12-23 11:39:40.755 -03 [201/T206] INFO: Terminating timer thread
2025-12-23 11:39:40.803 -03 [201/T203] INFO: Terminating database thread
2025-12-23 11:39:40.961 -03 [201/T204] INFO: Terminating GC thread
2025-12-23 11:39:40.999 -03 [201M] INFO: Finished final database update
2025-12-23 11:39:40.999 -03 [201M] INFO: Waiting for threads to join
2025-12-23 11:39:41.000 -03 [201M] INFO: Thread dns-client (2) is idle, terminating it.
2025-12-23 11:39:41.000 -03 [201M] INFO: Thread ntp-client (4) is idle, terminating it.
2025-12-23 11:39:41.000 -03 [201M] INFO: Thread webserver (7) is idle, terminating it.
2025-12-23 11:39:41.000 -03 [201M] INFO: All threads joined
2025-12-23 11:39:41.003 -03 [201M] INFO: PID file emptied
2025-12-23 11:39:41.006 -03 [201M] INFO: Stored 1 API session in the database
2025-12-23 11:39:42.053 -03 [201M] INFO: ########## FTL terminated after 6d 4m 31s  (internal restart)! ##########
2025-12-23 11:39:42.057 -03 [201M] INFO: ########## FTL started on pihole! ##########
3

I see that in the log. Just to verify that the UI or API restart causes a reload of config files in /etc/pihole/hosts and /etc/dnsmasq.d/?

Thanks for your help!