best way to gracefully shutdown process running on Google Cloud VM

Question

I'm running a blockchain node validator in a GCP ubuntu vm and need to shut it down so I can restart it.

What's the best way to stop just the validator, and not the entire vm?

The blockchain docs recommends stopping the running client (through a service manager or some mechanism that sends a SIGINT signal to the process), so it can trigger 2 events while gracefully shutting down:

• Running data flush to disk
• Release of the DB files lock by LevelDB

However the docs do not explain how to do this.

Answer 1

To send a signal to a program on Linux use the kill command:

kill <SIGNAL> <PID>

To list the running processes:

ps -axl

Look up the name of your program in the process list.

Common signals to set to programs are SIGHUP (1) and SIGINT (2). SIGKILL (9) is a forced terminate and the program cannot catch this signal.

Look up in their documentation which signal they use. You mentioned SIGINT.

kill 2 <PID>
or
kill SIGINT <PID>