How to put Apache website to 503 "temporary down"?

Question

RFC2616, 503 Service Unavailable

The server is currently unable to handle the request due to a temporary overloading or maintenance of the server

How to configure Apache 2.2 to serve particular name based virtualhost 503 code with custom HTML page?

Answer 1

503 Temporarily Unavailable, with trigger

RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{ENV:REDIRECT_STATUS} !=503 RewriteCond "/srv/www/example.com/maintenance.trigger" -f RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /$1 [R=503,L] 

If the maintenance.trigger file exists, Apache will serve up a 503 Service Unavailable response. To serve up a custom "down for maintenance" page, use ErrorDocument to specify the file, like so:

ErrorDocument 503 /503_with_cats.html 

Enjoy!

Answer 2

You could use mod_rewrite:

RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{ENV:REDIRECT_STATUS} !=503 RewriteRule !^/down/for/maintenance$ %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}down/for/maintenance [L,R=503] 

The RewriteCond directive makes sure that no additional internal error occurs when redirecting to a custom error document.