Comments on: Apache and Lighttpd server send error 503 when web site is under maintenance

By: Preet

Preet — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 07:35:03 +0000

The "something" can be ascecsed very easily with PHP. If you have a web page address that looks like this:index.php? month=september&name=smith&age=24Then you can access those values in PHP like this:This will print septembersmith24.As for accessing a text file, that's easy too:This will read the entire contents of the file textfile.txt into the variable $text, and then print it out for you.You can also access many databases with PHP, I highly recommend you use MySQL. It's a bit too complicated to describe here, though. There are some good references made to good books by folks above. The "Teach Yourself" series is great.

By: Max

Max — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 17:04:19 +0000

Good idea! In this case, we simply took the site down for a few hours so a 503 probably wasn’t necessary. Great suggestion for longer cases though.

Thanks!

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 18:11:15 +0000

Wow, thanks alot! I’ve been wondering how to do this for ages!

By: Frederick

Frederick — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 20:31:24 +0000

A better .htaccess rule might be:

RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !down.php$ RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /down.php [L]

By: vivek

vivek — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 10:35:40 +0000

Do you have other rewrite rules? if so add this rule before those rules

By: Carl

Carl — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 13:58:17 +0000

I have tried to use your method, but only the main page and a page one level deeper redirect successfully. If I go any deeper down a valid URL it does not display the site down page.

By: Sagri

Sagri — Fri, 11 May 2007 10:39:31 +0000

Hi,
Thats very efficient way of costimising error pages.

Do you know the way to do the same on tomcat alone with out web server. ie; with out apache.

I use only tomcat 5.5.12 and I want to customise my 503 pages when I am updating.

Thanks in advance.

By: sangamnath

sangamnath — Fri, 30 Mar 2007 11:05:59 +0000

Hi, i am getting the error 503 when i am importing the data to the client side.i am really not understanding wats the reason behind this.So please can any one help me out to solve this problem.Thanks in advance….

By: nixcraft

nixcraft — Sat, 06 Jan 2007 11:13:05 +0000

Jerry,

No .htaccess rule is correct. If file is not down.php it will display content of down.php for all site urls and sub directories.

Hope this helps.

By: Jerry

Jerry — Sat, 06 Jan 2007 10:50:45 +0000

I’m just learning to hack .htaccess and use mod_rewrite. It looks to me like this line:

RewriteRule !down.php$ /down.php [L]

only catches URLs to the root directory? How can I redirect all URLs, even URLs to subdirectories deeper in the site, so all URLs get a 503 maintenance page?

Thanks.

By: Daniel

Daniel — Mon, 01 Jan 2007 14:49:26 +0000

Do you need to restart Apache after modifying .htaccess? I think not. I you were changing httpd.conf I would agree.

By: nixcraft

nixcraft — Sat, 30 Dec 2006 01:22:34 +0000

Good idea; For lighttpd
lighttpd -t -f /etc/lighttpd.conf && /etc/init.d/lighttpd restart

Appreciate your post.

By: Lars Noodén

Lars Noodén — Fri, 29 Dec 2006 12:26:52 +0000

Good tips, but if the site is really important then the step on Restarting Apache 2 web server after saving and closing the file needs to verify that the syntax of the configuration file is correct. There are many ways mistakes or typos can be introduced, any of which will bring the server down.

# /etc/init.d/httpd restart
or
# /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

One should do a configuration test first. e.g.

# /etc/init.d/apache2 configtest && \
# /etc/init.d/apache2 reload

or
/usr/sbin/apache2ctl -t -f /etc/apache2.conf && \
/usr/sbin/apache2ctl -f /etc/apach2.conf graceful