---
title: "Restarting Passenger processes"
date: "2015-02-13"
category: "cgi-passenger"
slug: "restarting-passenger-processes"
---

## Overview

Passenger applications can be restarted by creating a special file in the `tmp/` directory within your application root (one level above the [[where-is-site-content-served-from]]).

**Important:** This is the `tmp/` folder inside your application directory, not the system `/tmp` directory.

## One-Time Restart

Create a file named `restart.txt` inside `tmp/`:

The application will restart within 2 minutes on the next incoming request.

## Restart on Every Request

Create a file named `always_restart.txt` inside `tmp/` to restart the application on every incoming request. This is useful for debugging during development.

**Warning:** Do not leave `always_restart.txt` in place for production applications. It causes significant performance degradation since the application restarts with every request.
