This site is under construction and is both very incomplete and subject to change.
The current cannonical site for documentation is here.

5. Reload the Jails

It should be this simple:

fail2ban-client reload

root@example:~# fail2ban-client reload
OK
root@example:~# 

However, you might get an error. For example:

root@example:~# fail2ban-client reload
2023-05-30 03:32:57,425 fail2ban                [1743]: ERROR   Could not find server
root@example:~# 

This usually means fail2ban isn’t running (although there are lots of other errors you can get too), so the first thing to try is starting fail2ban.