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I can not figure out how to stop a running geth node without killing the process. I tried to lookup geth help but there is no mention of stopping, halting or any shutdown command.

How to shutdown geth cleanly?

Edit:

I'm running it as a daemon, CTRL+C is no option.

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  • And how do I stop it if the Wallet crashed and Geth is still running as task in Windows? I use the task manager and stop the task but I fear it could harm something (even so it looks like it did not when I had to use it several times before). – Uwe G. Aug 13 '17 at 11:58
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Because you ran geth as a daemon you can either:

killall -HUP geth

in one line, or get the pid with:

ps ax | grep geth

and kill it with kill

kill -HUP <pid>

-HUP is the sighup signal, is optional but is more gentle than the normal TERM signal.

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  • 2
    +1 for using -HUP. – Afr Jan 29 '16 at 7:21
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    Instead of running ps and piping it to grep, you can use pgrep geth. One-liner: kill -HUP $(pgrep geth). – Diti Aug 13 '17 at 12:36
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    Or even pkill -HUP geth – carver Feb 27 '18 at 22:55
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    It continuously resurrect after kill – creator Apr 27 '18 at 7:40
12

use Ctrl c or

kill -INT <pid>

if you started geth with console, you exit with Ctrl D or 

> exit
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  • 6
    Is there really no command to stop a node? – Afr Jan 27 '16 at 16:57
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    @5chdn if your already in console, its fast to do Ctrl+c than opening up a new terminal tab to kill this. – niksmac Jul 17 '16 at 2:45
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    @5chdn I hear you bro. Something like bitcoin-cli stop, right? One would think that Ctrl+C or pkill don't let the program close well, but maybe they do? – e18r Jun 8 '17 at 18:46
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When running in console

Geth can be stopped by sending it a keyboard interrupt with Ctrl + c. You should see output similar to the following.

I0127 09:46:49.971487   62813 blockchain.go:1230] imported 1 block(s) (0 queued 0 ignored) including 0 txs in 2.836192ms. #913170 [2eb50f50 / 2eb50f50]
^C
I0127 09:46:54.258683   62813 cmd.go:123] Got interrupt, shutting down...
I0127 09:46:54.259731   62813 blockchain.go:677] Chain manager stopped
I0127 09:46:54.259774   62813 handler.go:191] Stopping ethereum protocol handler...
I0127 09:46:54.259797   62813 handler.go:201] Ethereum protocol handler stopped
I0127 09:46:54.259813   62813 transaction_pool.go:150] Transaction pool stopped
I0127 09:46:54.259831   62813 backend.go:630] Automatic pregeneration of ethash DAG OFF (ethash dir: /home/user/.ethash)
I0127 09:46:54.260551   62813 database.go:158] closed db: /home/user/.ethereum/chaindata
I0127 09:46:54.260716   62813 database.go:158] closed db: /home/user/.ethereum/dapp

In the event that go-ethereum receives multiple interrupts before shutting down cleanly, you should see something like this.

I0127 09:50:47.173412   63063 cmd.go:129] Already shutting down, please be patient.
I0127 09:50:47.173433   63063 cmd.go:130] Interrupt 9 more times to induce panic.

In this case if you continue to hit Ctrl + c to force the process to quit you may corrupt the underlying databases that go-ethereum maintains.

Killing a Daemon Process

If the process is running as a daemon, then you can kill it with kill -INT <pid> where <pid is the process id for the running geth process.

One way to find the process id is with ps aux | grep geth.

$ ps aux | grep geth
user           63353  91.2  0.2 573457444  29844 s019  R+   10:15AM   0:01.97 geth --rpc
user           63355   0.0  0.0  2434836    780 s021  S+   10:15AM   0:00.00 grep geth

Here the pid that should be killed is 63353.

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  • 3
    CTRL+C is no option, geth runs as daemon. – Afr Jan 27 '16 at 16:56
  • Updated with info on killing a daemon process. – Piper Merriam Jan 27 '16 at 17:16
3

Simply use

pkill -INT geth

which will reuslt in the same as pressing CTRL-C in geth console:

...
INFO [01-13|12:17:53] Imported new chain segment...
INFO [01-13|12:17:57] Got interrupt, shutting down... 
INFO [01-13|12:17:57] HTTP endpoint closed: http://...:8545 
INFO [01-13|12:17:57] IPC endpoint closed: /.../.ethereum/geth.ipc 
INFO [01-13|12:17:57] Blockchain manager stopped 
INFO [01-13|12:17:57] Stopping Ethereum protocol
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2

Ctrl D and then exit worked for me

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0

Here is the command:

sudo systemctl stop geth

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