How do you handle scheduled downtime?

[soniiic]

Hello,

I've been wondering how django devs handle scheduled downtime? Do you
use a different urls.py to always redirect someone to a 'service
unavailable' page?

Or is there something fancy that you do?

Thanks,

[Jason Emerick]

My setup is nginx which proxies back to apache+mod_wsgi.

Whenever there is downtime, I just change my nginx config for the site to point to a static file which is a maintenance page instead of the normal config which proxies the requests to apache that way I can completely take down apache or do whatever I need to.

Jason Emerick

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[Miles]

We have a default virtual host configured to show a maintenance page,
so when we disable the django virtual host, everything gets direct
there.

[Graham Dumpleton]

If using Apache/mod_wsgi and its daemon mode, just swap out the WSGI
script file with another which has a really basic raw WSGI application
which provides appropriate error response with explanation. The act of
replacing the WSGI script will cause the mod_wsgi daemon processes to
reload, thus unloading your Django application, and replacing it with
the simple WSGI application.

Be aware that you should not return normal 200 status responses, you
should use an appropriate error response, perhaps:

HTTP_SERVICE_UNAVAILABLE = 503

to ensure that nothing caches your outage page.

Graham