Site offline [maintenance] button.

[H4CK3R]

Hi,
What about a button in cpanel to make whole site unavailable with a custom message, "Site is currently under maintenance".

Why:
Every site needs some maintenance which may disturb users, so i think this option will help a lot.

Thanks for reading.

[monarobase]

If you could enter your IP and activate the maintenance page for all other IP's this could be an interesting feature, and quite easy to do with an .htacess file.

+1 for a maintenance mode that adds code to the .htaccess file to show a maintenance page to everyone except a specified list of IP's.

As far as we are concerned, this would be an interesting feature but not high on our list of priorities !

[PlotHost]

Yes, this would be a nice addition ... anyway you can always just put a index.php file with "Site is currently under maintenance" text.

[H4CK3R]

Thanks guys for the comment. But, uploading index.php file wont help, because it will just work for www.example.com and not for www.example.com/about and for others.

[monarobase]

You could also just password protect the site with a title saying that the site is in maintenance mode. This way you can still access your site but others can't.

[Brian]

Please note that this functionality is already inherently available via using a custom mod_rewrite rewrite rule.

[1] Create and customize a file called: maintenance.php

[2] Add the following to your .htaccess

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule !^maintenance.php$ /maintenance.php [R=302,L]

Any accesses to any page on the site OTHER than maintenance.php will be redirected to maintenance.php. Therefore, this disables all links/pages/etc. on the site other than maintenance.php

You can then comment out that rewrite rule as desired to enable/disable maintenance mode within seconds.

A full on feature to automate this, while not out of the question, seems a bit heavy handed given the 2-step process to activate it as it is now. In addition, many scripts in existence already have inherent "Maintenance Mode" functions within them.

EDIT
To address monarobase's request to allow maintenance mode to "exempt" certain IPs, you could modify Step 2 to the following rule:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} !^123\.123\.123\.123$
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} !^100\.100\.
RewriteRule !^maintenance.php$ /maintenance.php [R=302,L]

And so on. The above would exempt "123.123.123.123" and "100.100.*.*" from the rewrite and thus allow them to access the site. This admittedly can be a bit more complex since you need some basic Regular Expressions knowledge, but is still readily possible with cPanel as it stands right now.

[Infopro]

Moved to Workarounds forum.

[H4CK3R]

Yes, it worked, thanks.
But, what about subdomains? Do i have to add these lines to all .htaccess files of all subdomains?
And, i also need to ask one more question, should i ask here or create a new topic?
Question: I have a file, and i want to copy it to my all subdomains, (14 subdomains ) , i have to copy one by one, is there any way that i can copy to all at once?
Thanks.

[Infopro]

Different topic, different thread is always the best way to go.

[Indianets]

Interesting!

In /home/USER/.htaccess (note that not in public_html)

<Files *>
Order Deny,Allow
Deny From All
Allow From x.x.x.x
</Files>

ErrorDocument 403 "The Site is down for maintenance! Please come back later!"

Easy! No?

- Vijay

[H4CK3R]

Thanks.

[SoftDux]

Does anyone know of a workaround to have this feature enabled, but not allow the end user to disable the "maintenance mode" on their website?

i.e. let's say a website is defaced, I want their account to still be active for emails to work, but the website should be unavailable, till such a time as when the user fix or re-upload their website to the server

[cPanelTristan]

You could have a cron periodically overwrite any .htaccess with the content you've placed into it for that account. If you wanted to get really fancy, you could have a file of users in maintenance that is used for the cron script so that you don't have to manually figure out and revise each user. That way you could just edit /root/maintenanceusers or something each time someone is added or removed.

For the copy of the .htaccess, you could have the .htaccess stored somewhere else on the server as a backup copy in that instance for the cron script to pull the contents.