Creating a Maintenance Page

Sometimes there is a need to be able to completely disable access to content on your repository, but you want users to be aware that the repository is just unavailable temporarily for scheduled maintenance, which turning off your web server would not be possible. A common situation where you may want to do this is when you need to make alterations to the database and you want to ensure this does not otherwise change whilst you are making these alterations. The best way of doing this is to create a maintenance page, for which requests to your repository will be redirected.

The following guide provides instructions on how to produce a fully branded maintenance page. It is based on an approach originally developed for the CentOS 7 Linux but should work more generally, however, file paths are liable to be different.

1. Create a directory to host your maintenance page:

mkdir /var/www/maintenance

2. Copy the images, javascript and style directories from your archive's HTML cache directory to the maintenance page directory:

cp -rf /opt/eprints3/archives/example/html/en/images /var/www/maintenance/
cp -rf /opt/eprints3/archives/example/html/en/javascript /var/www/maintenance/
cp -rf /opt/eprints3/archives/example/html/en/style /var/www/maintenance/

3. Download the homepage of your repository. E.g.

wget -O /var/www/maintenance/index.html http://eprints.example.org/

4. Edit /var/www/maintenance/index.html and update the auto-X.Y.Z.css and auto-X.Y.Z.js with auto.css and auto.js. Then insert the following HTML markup, adjusting the dates DD/MM/YYYY, time HH:MM and REPOSITORY_NAME as appropriate. Where to put this will vary between repository; it is usually best placed after the title in the main content part of your page. (It may also be worth removing various parts of this page, such as the Latest Additions, as visitors will not be able to access them):

<div class="ep_msg_warning">
  <div class="ep_msg_warning_content">
    <table style="padding:5px">
      <tr>
        <td style="padding-right: 10px; padding-top: 5px; vertical-align: top;">
          <img alt="Warning" src="/style/images/warning.png" />
        </td>
        <td>
          <h3 style="padding: 10px 0 5px; 0; margin: 0;">Notice of Scheduled Maintenance</h3>
          <p>Please note that REPOSITORY_NAME will be unavailable from HH:MM on DD/MM/YYYY until 
          HH:MM on DD/MM/YYYY due to scheduled maintenance.  We apologise for any inconvenience.</p>
        </td>
      </tr>
    </table>
  </div>
</div>

5. Create /root/eprints-maintenance.conf containing the following lines, while updating ServerName and ServerAdmin as appropriate:

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName eprints.example.org
    ServerAdmin eprints@example.org

    DocumentRoot /var/www/maintenance
    ErrorDocument 503 /index.html
    <Directory /var/www/maintenance/>
        Options +Indexes +FollowSymLinks +MultiViews
        Require all granted
        RewriteEngine On
        RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(index|style|javascript|images)
        RewriteRule ^ /index.html [R=503]
    </Directory>
   
    ErrorLog logs/error_log
    TransferLog logs/access_log
    LogLevel warn
</VirtualHost>

6. Assuming your repository uses HTTPS you will also need to create a file called /root/eprints-maintenance-ssl.conf with the following contents. Update ServerName, ServerAdmin, SSLCertificateFile, SSLCertificateKeyFile and SSLCertificateChainFile as appropriate:

<VirtualHost *:443>
    ServerName eprints.example.org
    ServerAdmin eprints@example.org

    SSLEngine on
    SSLProtocol all -SSLv2 -SSLv3 -TLSv1 -TLSv1.1
    SSLHonorCipherOrder on
    SSLCompression off
    SSLSessionTickets off
    SSLCipherSuite ECDHE-ECDSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384:ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384:ECDHE-ECDSA-CHACHA20-POLY1305:ECDHE-RSA-CHACHA20-POLY1305:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:ECDHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES256-SHA384:ECDHE-RSA-AES256-SHA384:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-SHA256:ECDHE-RSA-AES128-SHA2
    SSLCertificateFile /opt/eprints3/archives/example/ssl/eprints.example.org.crt
    SSLCertificateKeyFile /opt/eprints3/archives/example/ssl/eprints.example.org.key
    SSLCertificateChainFile /opt/eprints3/archives/example/ssl/eprints.example.org.ca-bundle

    DocumentRoot /var/www/maintenance
    ErrorDocument 503 /index.html
    <Directory /var/www/maintenance/>
        Options +Indexes +FollowSymLinks +MultiViews
        Require all granted
        RewriteEngine On
        RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(index|style|javascript|images)
        RewriteRule ^ /index.html [R=503]
    </Directory>

    SetEnvIf User-Agent ".*MSIE.*" \
        nokeepalive ssl-unclean-shutdown \
        downgrade-1.0 force-response-1.0

    CustomLog logs/ssl_request_log \
         "%t %h %{SSL_PROTOCOL}x %{SSL_CIPHER}x \"%r\" %b"

    ErrorLog logs/ssl_error_log
    TransferLog logs/ssl_access_log
    LogLevel warn
</VirtualHost>

7. Next you will need to find the first line below in /etc/httpd/ (On RHEL/CentOS/Fedora) or /etc/apache2/ (on Ubuntu/Debian) and comment it out and add the second line:

Include /opt/eprints3/cfg/apache.conf
Include /root/eprints-maintenance.conf

8. Assuming you are running HTTPS on your repository you will need to find the first line of something in /etc/httpd/ or /etc/apache2/ and comment it out and then add the second line:

Include /opt/eprints3/archives/*/ssl/securevhost.conf
Include /root/eprints-maintenance-ssl.conf

9. Finally, you will need to restart the web server:

apachectl restart

You should now see that any request to your repository is redirected to /index.html (e.g. http://eprints.example.org/index.html), which displays your maintenance page.

Once maintenance is completed, all you need to do the reverse the commenting out in steps 7 and 8 as appropriate. (Keeping the new lines but commented out will save you time if you need to re-enable the maintenance page in future). Then just restart the web server again.

If you have planned maintenance again, assuming your branding does not change in the meantime, all you need to do is update the times in /var/www/maintenance/index.html uncomment and comment out the lines in steps 7 and 8 as appropriate and restart the web server and your maintenance page is back in place.