Redirecting during an upgrade

How not to get an endless loop?

[ianevans]

I figured I'd use the quieter summer days to upgrade both the mysql and php on my site.

I know the process should only take a few minutes if I plan in advance, but during that time I'd like all of the pages on our site to redirect to one page with a "We're upgrading the site, back in a few minutes" message.

We don't have mod_rewrite installed, but I understand that RedirectMatch can be used as well.

I suck at regex so how would I setup the RedirectMatch statement so that it will redirect every other page except for the "be right back" page. Obviously don't want to get caught in an endless loop.

Thanks.

[jdMorgan]

If you need a conditional rewrite, then mod_rewrite is your only real choice, unless you use RedirectMatch to redirect to a different domain (which avoids a loop).

If you take the second option, make sure you use a 302 or 307 status code redirect, since this is temporary.

Jim

[ianevans]

Just thinking out loud...

We don't have any pages on the site that end in .html, so couldn't the RedirectMatch regex be done in a way so that any url request not ending in .html would get directed to, say, berightback.html

Wouldn't that avoid the looping?

[jdMorgan]

The problem is that you need to express

If NOT "\.html$"
Then redirect

Since RedirectMatch looks for a positive match on a pattern, I don't see how you'd do that.

In mod_rewrite, you can use the NOT operator "!". I don't think that works with mod_alias, but you could try it.

Jim