How to force PowerDNS to reload a zone

Introduction

This article shows how to reload a DNS zone in PowerDNS. The pdnsutil load-zone tool in PowerDNS replaces the rndc reload command BIND uses to reload zones.

Procedure

If a zone change is made outside of the cPanel & WHM interface to a domain's DNS zone in /var/named, the following command-line tool (information extracted from --help output) needs to be run as root via SSH or in the WHM Terminal:

root@server [~]# pdnsutil load-zone ZONE FILE
# Load ZONE from FILE, possibly creating zone or atomically replacing contents

Here's an example:

root@server [~]# pdnsutil load-zone domain.tld /var/named/domain.tld.db
[bindbackend] Done parsing domains, 3 rejected, 14 new, 0 removed
Domain 'domain.tld' exists already, replacing contents

This command forces PowerDNS to load the DNS zone from the new zone file.