How to put Apache website to 503 "temporary down"?

503 Temporarily Unavailable, with trigger

RewriteEngine OnRewriteCond %{ENV:REDIRECT_STATUS} !=503RewriteCond "/srv/www/example.com/maintenance.trigger" -fRewriteRule ^(.*)$ /$1 [R=503,L]

If the maintenance.trigger file exists, Apache will serve up a 503 Service Unavailable response. To serve up a custom "down for maintenance" page, use ErrorDocument to specify the file, like so:

ErrorDocument 503 /503_with_cats.html

Enjoy!

You could use mod_rewrite:

RewriteEngine onRewriteCond %{ENV:REDIRECT_STATUS} !=503RewriteRule !^/down/for/maintenance$ %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}down/for/maintenance [L,R=503]

The RewriteCond directive makes sure that no additional internal error occurs when redirecting to a custom error document.

@temoto

To specify a 503 for bots and a maintenance page for humans, try the following

RewriteEngine onRewriteBase /#for bots such as googleRewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^.*(Googlebot|Googlebot|Mediapartners|Adsbot|Feedfetcher|bingbot)-?(Google|Image)? [NC]RewriteCond %{ENV:REDIRECT_STATUS} !=503RewriteRule !^/down/for/maintenance$ %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}down/for/maintenance [L,R=503]#for humansRewriteCond %{REMOTE_HOST} !^1\.1\.1\.1RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/maint.html [NC]RewriteRule .* /maint.html [R=302,L]