Maintenance mode during changes
This page is for website creators who must take a site offline for a while: an upgrade, an import, a restore. Maintenance mode answers every public page with a friendly 503 page while you work, and keeps the administration reachable (Maintenance mode).
Contents
What visitors get
Every page request gets the maintenance page with status 503 Service Unavailable, Retry-After and no-store, so
search engines come back later and nothing is cached. Images, styles and scripts are still served. Your message and the
expected end are shown.
From the administration
Setup > Maintenance (/setup/maintenance): an optional message, an optional expected duration (15 minutes to 4
hours in one click), who still gets in (your own address with one tick, other addresses), a preview, and a confirmation
before Take the site offline. While offline, the page shows an amber banner and Bring the site back online.
Maintenance never ends by itself.
From a shell
php bin/php/maintenance.php on --message="Back soon" --until=2h --allow-admin --allow-root-user
php bin/php/maintenance.php status --allow-root-user
php bin/php/maintenance.php off --allow-root-userWithout --allow-admin the administration is offline too. The same is ./console exp:maintenance.
The way back in
The whole state is one file, var/maintenance.json. Deleting it ends maintenance, whatever else is wrong. Every switch
is recorded in the audit trail.
Good practice
- Announce planned maintenance in advance and keep the window short.
- Let your own address through to test before switching back.
- Under Velocity, clear the response cache after switching back.
- For a backup alone, maintenance mode is only needed to keep database and files consistent.
Related pages
- Backups and restores
- Updates and upgrades for site owners
- Maintenance mode feature
- Free documentation: this page is free to copy, translate and improve under the GNU FDL 1.3.
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