PApabs3·Mar 17, 2022Submission
needrestart – check which processes need to be restarted after library upgrades
2 points · Open discussionliske
needrestart
Perl2015–2022
liske / needrestart
needrestart
Restart daemons after library updates.
6Distinct people
6Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
530GitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
Restart daemons after library updates.
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
What people are saying
No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year6 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2015-03-03 22:16:24 UTC to 2022-03-17 03:10:53 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2015 | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
What Hacker News says
6 sourcesThere are scripts and daemons that help you determine what needs restarting[1,2]. NixOS installs can go in separate directory prefixes when there are conflicts. For Gentoo and other Linux distributions, maintainers usually won't mark something stable without resolving conflicts, and this usually means sticking to older stable version of libraries until newer versions of libraries are fully supported by all installed packages. This can definitely be more work for maintainers, and as the blog posts says, it's a sisyphean task.
[1] https://manpages.debian.org/buster/debian-goodies/checkresta...
[2] https://github.com/liske/needrestart
In The modern packager’s security nightmareWhy won't you use https://github.com/liske/needrestart to automatically restart services that need restarting after security upgrades and unattendedupgrades or a cron job for rebooting the whole machine after kernel upgrades/periodically?
Shouldn't ansible do all this for you? I heard it's the recommended way for automatic updates and service restarts.
Please let me know about this as I'm interested myself.
In Post-mortem and remediations for the Matrix.org security breachhttps://github.com/liske/needrestart is quite useful. It even has heuristics for updates to Python code, Java classes...
In Don't tell people to turn off Windows Update> Generally, however, processes don't get restarted after updates and libraries don't get reloaded, so without rebooting, you're still running the unpatched versions.
It's possible determine what processes run outdated library code. There are tools which hook into the package manager which do this, like https://github.com/liske/needrestart
In Microsoft’s February security update release delayed to MarchYou could check out `needrestart`---I've used this on Ubuntu and Debian, so I can't vouch for other distros.
https://github.com/liske/needrestart
In No-reboot patching comes to Linux 4.0