I finally decided to create a maintenance page to use whenever I’m upgrading any of my sites. This solution was pretty simple. I added two RewriteCond stanzas to my .htaccess, at the top of the file at the base of the site. The first rewrite handles the case where the maintenance page exists:``` # If the maintenance.html page exists, redirect to that. RewriteCond /full/path/to/site/system/maintenance.html -f

Don’t redirect if the maintenance page was requested.

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !/system/maintenance.html RewriteRule ^.*$ http://blog\.coredump\.ca/system/maintenance.html [R,L] If the maintenance.html file exists, it is displayed. What happens when the maintenance is complete? Well, I remove the maintenance.html page of course. To prevent anyone from seeing a 404 once maintenance.html has been removed, I added the following to .htaccess immediately after the previous stanza: # If the maintenance.html page does not exist, redirect to the index. RewriteCond /full/path/to/site/system/maintenance.html !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} /system/maintenance.html RewriteRule ^.*$ http://blog\.coredump\.ca [R,L]

Now all I do whenever I bring the site down for maintenance is:

1. copy maintenance.html into the appropriate location;
2. perform the site maintenance;
3. remove maintenance.html.

Isn’t that easy?