‘Maintenance’ Pages via Apache mod_rewrite

Occasionally, I’ve found it useful to put up a maintenance page while performing some work on a website. It may be useful if you are debugging and want to ensure that regular visitors don’t see any application generated error messages or blank pages or anything.

This method uses mod_rewrite to redirect all requests to a maintenance page that you create. Since

First create maint.html with some message that you want to display to your users. Then add this to your Apache configuration to redirect users to that page. Obviously, you’ll need to substitute your own IP address. You can add multiple lines to include multiple users if necessary. The configuration essentially says requests not from your IP (notice the exclamation point) will be redirected to /maint.html and that is the last Rewrite rule that should be followed.

  ##### Maintenance section
  ## Uncomment and add your IP address for performing maintenance
  ## Add multiple addresses on multiple lines if necessary
  RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} !^11\.22\.33\.44$
  RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} !^1\.1\.1\.1$
  RewriteRule . /maint.html [L]
  ##### End Maintenance section