It's inconvenient that a Splunk deployment-server cannot reload an 'app'. It only reloads a 'serverclass'. Here's a shortcut.
The following bash script takes the name of a deployment-app as a parameter. It will reload serverclasses that use the deployment-app. Copy the script to your Deployment Server to make it easier to push out app changes to clients from the CLI.
#!/bin/bash
if [ $# -lt 1 ]; then
echo 1>&2 "$0: not enough arguments"
exit 2
elif [ $# -gt 1 ]; then
echo 1>&2 "$0: too many arguments"
exit 2
elif (! (grep -E -q "^\[serverClass:[^:]*:app:$1" /opt/splunk/etc/system/local/serverclass.conf )); then
echo 1>&2 "$0: No serverclasses found for $1"
exit 0
fi
grep -E "^\[serverClass:[^:]*:app:$1" /opt/splunk/etc/system/local/serverclass.conf | cut -d':' -f2 | sed -E 's/^(.*)$/ -class \1/g' | tr -d '\n' | xargs echo sudo -H -u splunkserviceaccount /opt/splunk/bin/splunk reload deploy-server -auth admin:changeme
read -p "Press [Enter] to execute above command..."
grep -E "^\[serverClass:[^:]*:app:$1" /opt/splunk/etc/system/local/serverclass.conf | cut -d':' -f2 | sed -E 's/^(.*)$/ -class \1/g' | tr -d '\n' | xargs sudo -H -u splunkserviceaccount /opt/splunk/bin/splunk reload deploy-server -auth admin:changeme
