If you have ever managed a web application, you know you have to take it down at times :). And you usually want to show an simple page stating that you are down for maintenance. Here is a simple way to setup a “maintenance” splash page. The assumption is that you have a Linux server to host the maintenance page.
- Configure lighttpd (HTTP Server) on the server using instructions from this article on Cyberciti.
- Edit the lighttpd.conf file and add the following line in your site configuration
[bash] server.error-handler-404 = "index.html" [/bash]
- Name your maintenance page as index.html and upload it to the document root (in this example, it is /var/www/html)
You are essentially telling the web server to display index.html whenever the user is trying to access content that is not present on the server. And since there is no content on the server other than the index.html, the web browser will always display the index.html page..
