Restarting the Application

If you have recently updated environment variables (like a .env file or appsettings.json) or if the processes have become stuck, the backend .NET processes need to be restarted to load the fresh configurations into memory.

There are two standard ways to restart the Ancestor Honor services.

Method 1: Redeploying via GitHub Actions (Recommended)

The easiest and most foolproof way to safely restart the services—especially if you do not have SSH access to the VPS server—is to re-trigger the automated deployment pipeline. Our CI/CD pipeline is designed to automatically restart the .NET listeners upon completion.

1. Go to the project’s GitHub Repository.
2. Navigate to the Actions tab.
3. Select the Deploy workflow from the left sidebar.
4. Click Run workflow and trigger it on the primary branch.

Once the pipeline successfully finishes, both the main application and the Chatbot API will have correctly rebooted.

Method 2: Restarting via SSH (Systemctl)

If you have terminal access to the VPSDime / HestiaCP server, you can use systemd to immediately restart the specific services. This is incredibly fast and the preferred method for sysadmins actively debugging.

1. SSH into the server as the root user.
2. Execute the restart commands. Ancestor Honor runs as two separate background services. Run the following commands:

# Restart the main Ancestor Honor application
systemctl restart ancestorhonor

# Restart the Chatbot API component
systemctl restart ancestorhonor-chatbot

Tip

If the application isn’t coming back online after a restart, you can check the logs by running systemctl status ancestorhonor to see if there were any crash errors during the startup sequence!