I have a Rails 4 app on a single Apache server on a Centos 6 box.
At the moment I am doing manual deployments, which is working well and only take a few minutes. I have no issue with this. Trying to be a smart developer, I would like to have the ability to "Take down" my site, deploy, test, then bring it back up once it's verified secure and working. I do all of my development on my locally so this is purely for the deployment aspect. Now by "Take Down" I mean that I would like to temporarily restrict access to a whitelist of IP addresses (me and my tester(s)) and redirect ALL other addresses to another virtual site. (basically a static html page with a "Currently undergoing updates" message or something)
I have tried looking around, but haven't found something that is quite what I would like. This need to be simple with a "light-switch" like ability to turn on and off whenever needed.
What is "Best Practice" on this? Should this be done through Apache? or Rails?
If this is done in Rails, (maybe with Action Dispatch) can it be turned on and off at a moment's notice, without having to re-compile the application?