"Upgrading our site" page

How best to handle upgrading a production server

[ianevans]

We're planning on upgrading our PHP and MySQL soon. Since our site is database driven, for the short while we'll be down I'd like all page requests for the site to go to a page with a "We're currently upgrading yada yada" message.

What's the best way to handle this sort of temporary "be right back" sort of situation in Apache?

[encyclo]

Probably the best mothod would to be to serve your temporary page with a 503 Service Unavailable error code (see the HTTP 1.1 status code definitions [w3.org]) rather than a 404 Not found code, which would risk deindexing if any search engine bots were visiting during your upgrade.

[ianevans]

The 503 is a good tip but I guess my original question was not clear.

I'm wondering what sort of temporary changes I should make to my httpd.conf so that all page requests get directed to one "be back in a few minutes" page.

I guess I could change the serverroot to a different directory and also change the custom 404.