downtime page in apache

Published August 24th, 2009

It is good practice to send 503 Status codes when your site has downtime or is doing an upgrade.

The easiest way to do this for all your URLs is something like this using mod_asis:

       # Bind mod_asis to files ending in .asis
       AddHandler send-as-is asis
       # Add other Aliaes/AliasMatches for any other resources needed (logos, css, etc)
       Alias /logo.png /opt/mysite/maint/logo.png
       # The magic line, pulling all matching URLs into one file
       AliasMatch /(.*) /opt/mysite/maint/index.html.asis

Your index.html.asis would contain something like this:

Status: 503
Cache-Control: no-cache
Content-type: text/html

<html><h1>My site is down, be back soon!</h1></html>

I can’t help you make a fail whale / plumber image though, that is up to you

Written by Paul Querna, CTO @ ScaleFT. @pquerna