Disabling a site for updates

[gerardg]

Anybody know of a quick way to disable an entire site so updates can be made? Ideally I'd like any requested page to display a 'temporarily down for updates' page while I upload files, modify the database, etc.

I'm guessing htaccess and mod_rewrite, but I'm not too familiar with mod_rewrite (I know regular expressions though).

[Anon]

you can upload a blank index.html file. everyone will see that instead of index.php

[gerardg]

Right - but that only disables index.php

[Anon]

i guess you could start giving people cookies ... and put a small include at the top of every page so that if they have a cookie they get redireced to index.html.

[Anon]

If you have access to httpd.conf or .htaccess you can have everybody else that hits up your site go to a set page then configure you ip to be allowed through. or jsut setup a simple .htaccess password system and have the message be somthing to the effect of

'site is currently being updated please try back later' and if you have a user/pass it would allow you access.

[scottd]

How about this? Stick it in .htaccess.

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} yourdomain.co.nz$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !newfolder/
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ newfolder/$1

Create a new folder with a index.html page that has your temp message.

scottd

[gerardg]

Cool - can't get it to work though. Not sure if my host has rewrite enabled. This also works:

RedirectMatch .* updating.html