Telling users there is maintenance happening

rubyonrails-talk
1

Telling users there is maintenance happening Rubyonrails-talk friends,

Is there a way to flip a Rails website into a maintenance mode? That is, have all page requests going to the site go to a “Sorry, we’re under maintenance and will be back in 2 hours an 12 minutes.”? And then flip back when maintenance is complete?

I suspect it has something to do with routes.rb but I would love some guidance.

Ralph Shnelvar

Rubyonrails-talk friends,

I’m not sure where to post this question.

I have two computers. Both have been set up as Rails servers although I only have one of the two machines being a server at any one time because the servers are not serving up static web pages. My web pages are NOT being hosted by an external ISP.

Let’s call the two machines Server X and Server Y. Server X is the one that runs as an Apache server for, say 23 hours per day. Server Y runs WEBrick so I can do development. Server Y is capable of running Apache.

What I want to do sometimes is shut down Server X and then use Server Y to show an “Under maintenance until X” screen while I do maintenance on Server X.

Since Server X and Server Y are - more or less - identically configured, what is the best way for me to put up an “Under maintenance” web page?

I know there are lots of cute “Under maintenance” web pages “out there.” Is there a preferred one for Rails servers?

As an aside. Assume Servers X and Y are both running and serving up the same static web pages. Is there anything wrong with that?

Ralph Shnelvar

2

I have used this route in the past to do this in an informal manner:

get '*', redirect_to: '/maintenance.html'

...and put that at or near the top of the routes file. Comment it out when you want to run normally.

The Gem approach will do a more thorough job, catching post and patch and everything.

Walter

3

Rails.application.routes.draw do if File.exist?(‘/home/real-estate-data-mining/MaintenanceNow’) get ‘*’, redirect_to: ‘/maintenance.html’ else resources :experiments resources :articles end end

``

So I tried this: `

`but it doesn’t work

I do see that there is a Rails.application.reload_routes!

So, clearly, I don’t understand how routes.rb works. Is routes building a very expensive process to be done infrequently?

Ralph Shnelvar

4

Rails routes are built when the app starts (or if you're under a lot of traffic, if you fork a new Apache process). Rails is a long-running process, and it does not reload at each request. You would have to restart the server to have a change in routes make a difference. If you've deployed with Passenger, then touch tmp/restart.txt will do the trick.

Walter

5

If you’re using capistrano for deployment (it’s great!) - then this is a good option