Once in a while every bigger website is relaunched.

In order to deploy bigger changes without bothering your visitors with strange behaviour during a data migration, updates and the like, you should use Apache2’s mod_rewrite. Just put the following lines in a .htaccess file in your webroot directory and all traffic (also deep links to subdirectories) gets diverted to the maintenance-page. The scond line sets an exception for your IP address, so you are the only visitor who is NOT redirected to the mainteance page:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} !192\.168\.123\.101
RewriteRule !maintenance/index.html /maintenance/index.html [L,NC,R=301]

Do not forget to remove the .htaccess file after you have finished your work!

Tags: Serverstuff