Am I right to assume certificate renewal with the same filename requires a dovecot reload/restart

[Yassine Chaouche]

The general answere here is try and see, as you could totally test it on 
your own. The certificate is read at startup and put in memory for the 
rest of the execution time. Dovecot won't monitor the file for changes 
on disk, as this would waste CPU cycles and make dovecot only slower for 
no reason. The process (or person) that changes the file is responsible 
to restart dovecot to reload the new certificate in memory.

Yassine.

On 3/14/19 9:14 AM, Guido Goluke, MajorLabel via dovecot wrote:
> Running dovecot 2.2, apologies if this question has been asked before: 
> I've done the research but couldn't find anything.
>
> I run a server that uses dovecot as a MUA for Postfix and have a Let's 
> Encrypt certificate that auto-renews through certbot on Ubuntu server 
> 16.04. Dovecot did not pick up on the new certificate for the 
> hostname. It did after a restart. To be clear: Let's Encrypt 
> overwrites the previous certificate using the same path and filename. 
> Am I right to assume that Dovecot needs a reload/restart after the 
> certificate has been renewed in order to 'pick up' on the new 
> certificate and if so, would I require a reload or a restart?
>
> Thank you in advance
>