Enabling and Disabling Maintenance Mode

Enabling and Disabling Maintenance Mode with Joe Shindelar In this tutorial, we'll learn how to enable maintenance mode, to set up a "site under maintenance" message, and how to disable it. By the end of this tutorial, you'll know how to put your site into maintenance mode, which allows users with the right permissions to use the site, while users without this permission are presented with a message that the site is currently under maintenance. Before you get started with this tutorial, you want to make sure that you're familiar with the concept of performing regular security updates, and if you want to use Drush to enable or disable maintenance mode, Drush must be installed. See the written version of this tutorial for links to each of these prerequisite tutorials. First, we're going to walk through enabling maintenance mode using the administrative interface. In the Manage administrative menu navigate to Configuration. Then under the Development section navigate to Maintenance mode. We can put the site into maintenance mode by checking the Put site into maintenance mode box on this form. We can additionally specify the information that is shown to website visitors when maintenance mode is enabled. Placeholders such as @site can be used in the message. Let's use the text: @site is currently under maintenance mode. We should be back shortly. Thank you for your patience. Once we're happy with the text, we can click Save configuration. You can verify that your site is in maintenance mode by accessing it from another browser, where you are not logged in. If for some reason it doesn't appear to be working, try clearing the cache so that the settings take place. Additionally, when you're logged in as a user that has permission to view the site in maintenance mode, you should see this message, Operating in maintenance mode, displayed on all pages. In order to disable maintenance mode, we'll navigate back to the maintenance mode configuration page. And, then uncheck the box Put site into maintenance mode and click Save configuration. Once again, you can verify that the site is no longer in maintenance mode by accessing it from another browser, where you are not logged in. And if the settings don't appear to take effect, try clearing the cache. We can also enable or disable maintenance mode using Drush. At the command line, enter this command: drush sset, for state set, system.maintanence_mode 1 and then hit Enter. Followed by drush cr to rebuild the cache. The combination of these 2 commands will put your site into maintenance mode. You should then verify that the site is indeed in maintenance mode by visiting the site in a browser where you are not logged in. To disable maintenance mode, run the Drush commands again. This time system.maintenance_mode should be set to zero. Clear the cache so that the settings take effect, and then verify in your browser that it is indeed no longer in maintenance mode. In this tutorial we learned how to use both the administrative user interface and the Drush command line tool to enable and disable maintenance mode for our site.