You can use mod_rewrite, but you'll have to delete the default .htaccess that Rails
provides (so that your requests don't go through CGI/FastCGI), and you'll have to
make sure that you have no rewrite rules that conflict with Rails.

Does answer this solve your issue?

That's what I'm doing now, but I was thinking it could be really nice to have maintenance.html handling just built 
into Passenger. Then I wouldn't have to configure apache with rewrite rules at all, or at a minimum I would have 
to add a single item. Probably your best bet, and one that would work okay with the rails community, would be 
to say that if a file was in system/maintenance.html passenger would always serve that rather than the real 
application files. That would be a really nice feature, and would take away my last need for mod_rewrite. And, it's 
something most rails users do in their deployment scenario with capistrano.

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I've attached a patch that handles this... I haven't done any extensive benchmarking or anything but I can't see 
any way that it could be much slower than using mod_rewrite with a -f rule.

	maintenance_html.patch
	582 bytes Download

Oh, sorry, one clarification on the patch. That patch is against the 1.0.5 codebase, because I couldn't get the 
current git tree to build on my system.

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Got the current git head & integrated alan.johnson's patch in with it.

Running ab -n 10000 -b 10 w/ a simple rails app showed no noticeable change (e.g. means were the same) in 
request times etc.

Anyone want to volunteer to test this?

	maintenance_file_2.patch
	1.3 KB Download

With the move to Rack support, would it make more sense to plan on maintenance.html being in the tmp 
directory instead of the public/system directory? A lot of frameworks won't have a public folder to put that into, 
but using the tmp directory, like is done with restart.txt, should make it work for anyone.

alan.johnson: The system folder (esp. for rails) is usually only created when you want to the maintenance page 
isn't it? (ignoring the fact some developers may be using it for their own stuff). Putting it in tmp/ sounds like a 
decent idea but the whole point of it (as far as I can see) is that since system/maintenance.html is a Capistrano-
specific (well, as far as I know) choice and hence it should work with anything (No matter whether it is a rails 
application or not).  Ideally (I don't know enough about apache to do it) it'd be nice to let the user configure the 
location with the default being system/maintenance.html at least for the fact it's *not* Rails specific, it's 
Capistrano specific.

Good call. If I get a chance I'll dig in and see if I can figure out how to add that configuration option.

How about adding a check for a maintenance.html page anywhere in the project directory?

I guess we have two options here... add the check in the project folder, or just add a configuration option. I 
guess comment on what you want and I'll try and put it together.

As a side note, when I put this into production at one point, I started getting tons of segfaults. I've got one 
server that never segfaults on it, and one that segfaults every request, but I'm not sure if it's my fault, 
passenger's fault, or the configuration's fault.

I'd actually prefer not to have this -- we use a different set of Rewrite Rules from
the "standard" to generate our maintenance pages and would be quite upset if the App
Server decided this for us.

Better is just to use Apache's mod_rewrite for this. If mod_rewrite doesn't work,
then that's the real bug. This is exactly the sort of thing it was invented for (and
why some of us want to use apache in the first place...)

I agree with comment 13 -- Use mod_rewrite to achieve this. What if your
maintenance.html page has an image in it? Would passenger automatically redirect
requests to maintenance.html, except for images?

Seems to be no longer necessary now that mod_rewrite is fully supported.

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