TheBlatherskite

Using Capistrano's disable_web on Site5

Posted by theBlatherskite Mon, 16 Apr 2007 05:16:00 GMT

I’ve been playing around with capistrano lately, and I think I’ve fallen in love. It was merely a convenience until that ill-fated deployment – that moment when, with panicked error messages scrolling across my screen and equally panicked (if less verbose) thoughts filling my head, a decisive cap rollback restored the calm.

Most recently, however, I discovered the cap disable_web and cap enable_web commands. These let you, with one command, push a helpful static ‘maintenance’ page out to the users while you do, well, maintenance. With a little customization, the page can be downright professional (at least, I like to think my implementation of it was).

The One-Step Process

Besides briefly introducing these concepts for anyone new, however, the point of this post is to document the steps (okay, step) needed before the fresh-out-of-the-box disable_web will work for you on Site5 (and anywhere else with an apache-based server environment): add the following code to .htaccess in /public. It tells apache to serve up the static maintenance.html page, if it exists… so disable_web merely creates an html file and uploads it (which is why it’s so easy to customize – just change the HTML in the file).

RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/system/maintenance.html -f
RewriteCond %{SCRIPT_FILENAME} !maintenance.html
RewriteRule ^.*$ /system/maintenance.html [L]

That’s it.