If you manage a debian package, you sometimes need to restart a service after the setup. It’s generally done in the postinst script. But sometimes you didn’t have change configuration files and you don’t want to restart the service.

Here a simple example where postinst script will check if configuration files have changed and restart service only when necessary.

In this example, my package contains virtual hosts for apache server. I will make a md5sum of the files before the setup of my new version of the package.

In the DEBIAN/preinst:

find /etc/apache2/sites-available/ -type f -print0 | xargs -0 md5sum >> /tmp/apache-confs.old

And then I will check for changes files in the DEBIAN/postinst:

find /etc/apache2/sites-available/ -type f -print0 | xargs -0 md5sum >> /tmp/apache-confs.new

DIFF=$(diff /tmp/apache-confs.new /tmp/apache-confs.old)
if [ "$DIFF" != "" ]; then
service apache restart
fi
rm /tmp/apache-confs.*

Warning: diff exit status code is 1 when there are differences between file so “set -e” will break the postinst script if you have one.