“Controller is running. Please stop ioBroker first.” – Although iobroker is already stopped.

Problem

You want to update your ioBroker. Although you have stopped the service with “iobroker stop”, the next command “iobroker upgrade self” fails with the error message “Controller is running. Please stop ioBroker first”.

Solution

ioBroker does not stop properly for some reason. This is related to the new installation routine. Stop IoBroker as follows:

Method 1:

sudo systemctl stop iobroker

Now all services should really be dead and you can continue with “iobroker upgrade self”.
Background: systemctl is the successor of init.d.

Method 2, when running in Docker-Container e.g. on Synology:

pkill -u iobroker