Maintenance page on nginx, best practices

Question

I want to configure the server to show a maintenance page when it exist. I tried this code and works:

location / {
    try_files /maintenance.html $uri $uri/ @codeigniter;
}

But I noticed it would be served with a 200 status code, and it can cause confusion to search engines. I think the best practice would be returning a 503 status code. On google I find several relevant pages about it, like this. However, they use if to make the redirect and according to nginx documentation it isn't safe to use ifs.

Is there a way of doing it without using if? Is safe to use if in this case?

Thanks.

Answer 1

I think the best practice would be returning a 500 status code.

I think you mean 503 instead of 500.

they use if to make the redirect and according to nginx documentation it isn't safe to use ifs.

No. Only return is 100% safe inside if in location context.

According to nginx documentation, you can specify an HTTP status code as the last argument to try_files. I've tried this but it didn't work.

Answer 2

Here is what I do.

            if (-f $document_root/maintenance.html) {
                    return 503;
            }
            error_page 503 @maintenance;
            location @maintenance {
                    rewrite ^(.*)$ /maintenance.html break;
            }

If the file is there it will show the maintenance page. Once you remove the file you will go back to normal.

Answer 3

Yes, it's important to use HTTP 503 for temp. redirects. That's the way I've solved it:

server {
        listen      80;
        server_name joergfelser.at;
        root    /var/www/joergfelser.at/;

        location / {
            if (-f $document_root/maintenance.html) {
                return 503;
           }
            ... # rest of your config, it's important to have 
            ... # the maintenance case at the very top
         }

        error_page 503 @maintenance;
        location @maintenance {
                rewrite ^(.*)$ /maintenance.html break;
        }
}

I've also written a blog post on that topic:
https://www.joergfelser.at/redirecting-to-a-custom-nginx-maintenance-page/

Happy maintenancing ;)