How should one kill the tezos-node process?

Question

I have several times found myself unable to restart my tezos node because I believe I have ended the process but when I try to start it again I get the following message:

Data directory is locked by another process

Most recently I used Ctrl-C, then when I did not see progress, I used Ctrl-Z. I believe this put the process in the background further adding to my confusion.

What method should I use to reliably end the tezos-node process? If I accidentally put the process in the background, is there a way for me to bring it back to the foreground?

Answer 1

Your should use "Ctrl+c" (or kill -15 <Process-ID>) to terminate tezos node. This will take some time because the node tries to softly cancel all scheduled actions, and to keep the database in a consistent state.

"Ctrl+z" (or kill -19 <Process-ID>) just pauses the process. You can bring it back by running fg command in the same terminal (or with kill -18 <PID>).

Note that you can also send a SIGKILL signal (kill -9 <PID>) that will terminate the process immediately. But this is not recommended I think, as it may corrupt the database.

Finally, you can get the PID of your tezos-node process(es) with ps -A | grep tezos-node.