Site maintenance mode during rebuilds?

[mlinksva (Mike Linksvayer)]

Continuing the discussion from How do I update my Docker image to latest?:

@codinghorror

Should take about 10-15 minutes but it depends where you are hosted. Good news is the Docker images don’t change too often.

Only took 7 minutes just now for me on a $20/month DigitalOcean instance, site down (refusing connections) for about 6 minutes, 502 from nginx for last seconds before app back up. Similar when rebuilding to install a plugin which makes sense given it is the same command.

If you’re already on site when it goes down, clicking on a topic obtains a nice looking message

Topic failed to load
Sorry, we couldn’t load that topic, possibly due to a
connection problem. Please try again. If the problem persists, let us
know.
[Try Again]

It’d be really nice if a maintenance webserver stated up while the app is down so a nice message rather than connection refused could be displayed. Presumably that’d be a lot of juggling for a small benefit. Maybe some enterprise customer will want the appearance of zero downtime and pay for it someday.

[downey (Michael Downey)]

Agreed on this. Alternatively, any hacks people have come up with, to put something up in place of the down site would be welcome, too.

[jesselperry (Jesse Perry)]

It’s pretty trivial to set up your registrar to do a temporary redirect to a “We’re down…” message on another web server, right?

I’ve just never bothered because I don’t have that many visitors to bother for a 15 minute window.

By and large, I’m really impressed with the speed of the upgrade process.

[downey (Michael Downey)]

@jesselperry

It’s pretty trivial to set up your registrar to do a temporary redirect to a “We’re down…” message on another web server, right?

Maybe? I’m not exactly sure what domain registration would have to do with this, so perhaps you can say more of what you’re thinking about?

Generally, we’re very happy with our Discourse uptime, but when it does go down for (planned or unplanned) maintenance, it’s a bit annoying to get additional help desk tickets when the same people are already dealing with the outage/upgrade.

[mlinksva (Mike Linksvayer)]

Presumably @jesselperry means having DNS point to a different host during maintenance. This would only make sense for extended downtime given that DNS needs to propagate.

[jesselperry (Jesse Perry)]

Most registrars let you set up a subdomain Forward temporarily to override DNS (as long as Nameserver is set to the registrar’s) it will be an immediate change.

[Overgrow (OG)]

I can’t found topic about temporary page setup (possibly with apache2 or nginx on host) when rebuilding container… I’ve seen some howto here in forum which I struggle to find…

Can’t somebody point me there or share their strategy for site down times? I’d like to display “Site under maintenance” message to users…

In general: Is it reasonable solution to have host server to serve that page? How do you guys do it here on meta?

[Steven]

Here

Add an offline page to display when Discourse is rebuilding or starting up

This guide is intended for advanced users, who are already using nginx outside the docker container. By following this guide you make your setup more complicated and will loose some speed benefits like HTTP2 if you’re not running Ubuntu 16.04 or later. Proceed with caution! When Discourse is rebuilding or starting up, your users will usually either see an error message from their browser… [image] …or a not-so-nice 502 error message from Nginx: [image] If you’re a perfectionist l…