How to implement "Maintenance Mode" on already established website

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+3 Q:

How to implement "Maintenance Mode" on already established website

I have built a fairly robust website (PHP) with more than 60 pages. I have only now realized (unfortunately) that I should have built in an "In Maintenance Mode" feature to allow an admin to temporarily disable the website and point it to a Maintenance Mode page. This would only allow those logged in as an admin to view the website.

The options I see are:

Add a new "include" file to the top of every single PHP page.
I have one include that is used to display the navigation bar on every page (navigation class). I could write the Maintenance Mode code in this class.

Do I have any other options? The 1st option doesn't seem like the most efficient, and the 2nd one just seems like bag programming. Is there any other better way to include a new file on every single php file?

Thanks!

ps - the site is not launched yet

+6 A:

you can use .htaccess to redirect to another page while on Maintenance Mode

Maintenance mode for apache

Redirect to maintenance page during upgrade using .htaccess

Luis Melgratti 2009-09-08 23:26:43

As you can see in the examples you can exclude some IP.

Luis Melgratti 2009-09-08 23:31:26

That looks like a good quick alternative. I'm hoping to find other methods that may be more scalable so that each time I have a new admin, I don't have to update the .htaccess file and enter in their IP. Perhaps I'm getting a bit to ahead of myself though? For the next year I probably won't have very many new admin's. Perhaps implementing a simple quick .htaccess fix for now would work until I really need to implement the robust method. What do you guys think? Is it better to build it the "proper" way right now? Or just do the easy way until I need to make it more complex?

justinl 2009-09-08 23:34:51

This requires you to know the IP addresses of all admins ...

OIS 2009-09-09 00:00:47

Out of all of the options, I would say this is the best direction. It gives you the most flexibility and control site wide.

Dooltaz 2009-09-09 00:12:39

Well this sounds like the best solution for the time being until I really need to build something complex considering this will take me only a few minutes to put together.

justinl 2009-09-09 00:41:47

By the way, if anyone else uses this method, you will need to add a line into the .htaccess file to allow any external css files. To allow all css files use this:%{REQUEST_URI} !.css$

justinl 2009-09-09 03:38:44

The simplest way would be to centralize some of the logic regarding site generation. This way you could turn maintenance mode on and redirect any non admins to a different page. This would not be hard to do, as I imagine you have some code that keeps popping up all over the place, so just extend the login functionality to check for a global variable (if you don't have any common global variables across your page you could just set it in .htaccess via setenv).

Miha Hribar 2009-09-08 23:35:11

+3 A:

auto_prepend_file string

Specifies the name of a file that is automatically parsed before the main file. The file is included as if it was called with the require() function, so include_path is used.

The special value none disables auto-prepending.

you can set this in php.ini, or in apache (virtual) host file or .htaccess with php_flag auto_prepend_file file.php

[or php_admin_flag (?)]

edit

Maybe you should not put the include file in your web root dir or a sub folder.
And remember to call exit or die at the end.

OIS 2009-09-08 23:35:58

And you could add `exit;` somewhere at the end to stop the rest of your code from being parsed.

alex 2009-09-08 23:37:58

@alex: yes. should not assume people know about exit just because they got 60+ pages of php. :I

OIS 2009-09-08 23:44:25

haha yes thanks. It's easy to create lots of files and not really know what you're doing still :P

justinl 2009-09-09 00:40:45

Thanks OIS for sharing about the auto_prepend_file. I didn't know about that and I'm confident that it will come in useful later. :)

justinl 2009-09-09 00:42:37

Good tutorial, thanks for the help. greetings from germany

2009-09-15 09:00:10

ansaurus

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How to implement "Maintenance Mode" on already established website

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