dovecot - Mar 2019 - Am I right to assume certificate renewal with the same filename requires a dovecot reload/restart

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

-- 
MajorLabel

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
>

On 3/14/19 9:32 AM, Yassine Chaouche via dovecot wrote:
> 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.
I should mention that this is also true for Apache and postfix.

Yassine.