If you don't care about uptime just replace the old binary with the new binary and then restart the server. This is from a book called "Nginx HTTP server": 1.

If you don't care about uptime just replace the old binary with the new binary and then restart the server. This is from a book called "Nginx HTTP server": 1. Replace the old Nginx binary (by default, /usr/local/nginx/sbin/nginx) with the new one. 2. Find the pid of the Nginx master process, for example, with ps x | grep nginx | grep master or by looking at the value found in the pid file. 3. Send a USR2 (12) signal to the master process—kill –USR2 , replacing with the pid found in step 2. This will initiate the upgrade by renaming the old .pid file and running the new binary. 4. Send a WINCH (28) signal to the old master process—kill –WINCH , replacing with the pid found in step 2. This will engage a graceful shutdown of the old worker processes. 5. Make sure that all the old worker processes are terminated, and then send a QUIT signal to the old master process—kill –QUIT , replacing with the pid found in step 2.