David's Computer Stuff Journal

Redirect All Requests to a Single Page

Posted by David N. Welton Sun, 26 Oct 2008 08:27:00 GMT

I found this little tidbit useful. I guess it's not that hard to figure out yourself, but it might make a nice FAQ. Basically, in the midst of moving some of my server stuff over to Slicehost, I knew my web server wouldn't be able to respond for a few minutes, so I wanted to put a reasonable looking "Sorry, we'll be back soon" message, rather than just letting it fail. On a Debian or Ubuntu system, this ought to be enough:

In the /etc/apache2/apache2.conf file, the last line looks like so:

Include /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/

Comment it out, and put this in instead:

#Include /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/

AliasMatch .* /var/www/backsoon.html

All it takes is an /etc/init.d/apache2 reload to make the change take effect, and another one once you're up and running again.

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  1. Steve Kemp
    28 minutes later:

    I've always preferred this approach:


    

    RewriteEngine on

    RewriteCond /tmp/down.html -f

    RewriteRule /*  /tmp/down.html [L]

    That way to take the site down you just create a basic HTML page and save it to /tmp/down.html - if it exists it is served for all visitors. If it doesn't then it isn't.

    (Of course there is going to be the overhead of a single stat() for each incoming request; and it doesn't make sense if you're not already using mod_rewrite.)

  2. Gianugo Rabellino
    about 2 hours later:

    If you care about search engine indexing, you might want to consider 302'ing instead than serving a page that might pollute your results. Even better, serve the page with a 307 code.

  3. Steve Kemp
    about 3 hours later:

    Search engines are one thing to care about - but probably only if your site is "offline" for a significant period of time.

    Another thing that you might consider important, and could overlook, is what happens when RSS readers attempt to read a feed hosted on your site and get back plain HTML instead ..

  4. David Welton
    about 7 hours later:

    Good points. It would be nice to come up with some sort of 'definitive' recipe for this and post to to the Apache docs, or somewhere else appropriate.