Restart PiHole without a reboot

For whatever reason I had a hell of a time getting my piholes to work after the recent upgrade to version 6. One didn't have a web interface and in some circumstance it consumed all of my memory on the old Raspberry Pi it's running on. The other just outright didn't migrate my config and left things in a bad way.

In both cases, I'd prefer to restart the pihole service instead of the whole box. There's no pihole CLI option to do so, it seems. I did find out that I could restart it via systemd, using the following command.

sudo systemctl restart pihole-FTL

That allowed me to make changes to the config file manually at /etc/pihole/pihole.toml and restart without a reboot.

Additionally, I wanted to clean up the packages that were no longer needed from pihole version 5. The following did it for Debian.

sudo apt-get purge idn2 lighttpd php8.2-cgi php8.2-common php8.2-intl php8.2-json php8.2-sqlite3 php8.2-xml
sudo apt-get autoremove --purge

Be sure to check the list of packages being removed from the autoremove. In my case it was only libsodium23.

A bit of a frustrating experience but the result is nice. I like the new looks and the fact that the web port is easily changed and no longer requires a bunch of other dependencies is great.