Wednesday, January 16, 2013

Put apache in maintenance mode

Sometimes you need to perform actions in your backend and at the same time inform your visitors about it without presenting a weird error message.

Here is a POB recipe to switch on and off "maintenance mode" in a remote apache server. Dod I mention I run this remotely in my servers using Remoto-IT?

It assumes you have a virtual hosts file with some commented out rewrite rules, for example:
#RewriteEngine on
#RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^(/html|/images|/js|/css).*$ [NC]
#RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /html/error/503.html [L,R=301]
It will then just comment the lines out or put them back based on the remote invocation of the script:
common/apache/site-in-maintenance.sh /etc/apache2/sites-available/bhub-ssl true
So of course rather than touching the files manually in every server you can just send the command over the wire which is both more predictable and faster.

I am "reusing" here the same page that will be rendered in the case the application is indeed down for any other reason but can definitely have two different pages for such different situations.

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