I want to take my site offline for maintenance

Category:Approaches

The Goal

You want to drop your site down, take it off-line, for maintenance, upgrades, because you have a security concern - whatever.

Discussion

The two broad types of approach are:

o Provide a web tool to give admins the ability to bring a site up or down o Rely on command line (eg. ssh) access to the web server

The pros of the former is that any idiot can do it. The downside, of course, is that any idiot can do it.

The pros of the latter is that it's a simple and immediately effective change, and requires no PHP coding.

The approaches

o I want to take my site offline for maintenance - jedd - using CLI and a file/name swap, o I want to take my site offline for maintenance - rogierb - using a pre-system hook o I want to take my site offline for maintenance - natebot - using .htaccess o I want to take my site offline for maintenance - your-CI-login-name-goes-here - description of your approach goes here ...

Note to would-be contributors - it'd be just fantastic if you'd spend the time sharing your approaches with the world, but please resist the temptation to provide a link to another site. First, sites come and go, and dead links are a real pain in the proverbial. Second, off-site material doesn't get discovered by searches within the wiki. Third, the world has enough web pages that are 'lists of links' - we don't need to add to the collection. And finally - the whole idea of this collection of Approaches is so that users can see what you do - so can you please put your name on anything you contribute, so people can PM you if they want to clarify something?

Need to automatically insert category/subcategory listing here somehow, later - for the moment I'll handcode in the first couple of links