Hello experts,

Although I have found of lot of info on how to get NGINX to return 503 customer error pages I have not been able to find out how to do the following:

Sample config file:

location / {
root www;
index index.php;
try_files /503.html = 503;
}

error_page 503 /503.html;
location = /503.html {
root www;
}

As you can see, according to the code above, if a page called error503.html is found in my root directory, the site will return this very page to the user.

The issue:

It seems that although the code above works when someone simply visits my site typing http://www.mysite.com, it DOES NOT TRAP a request like http://www.mysite.com/profile.php. With my code, the user can still see the profile page or any other pages besides index.php.

The question:

How do I trap requests to all pages in my site and forward them to error503.html whenever error503.html is present in my root folder?

Thank you for any help.

To return a "503 temporarily not available, server in maintenance mode, dont worry we are coming back ;) " - page you can simply do:

location / {
return 503;
break;

root www;
index index.php;
}

You probably want to have the 503 without a change in your configuration by simply moving a 503.html into your doc root..

in the try_files documentation they have an example for this http://wiki.nginx.org/NginxHttpCoreModule#try_files

try_files 503.html @fallBackWhen503doesntExist;

location @fallBackWhen503doesntExist {
do your default stuff;
}

error_page 503 /503.html;
location /503.html
{
root www;
return 503;
}

I'd say this is bad practise ( if it works, didnt try ) because you will use the fallback ( error case ) to deliver your websites and each requests will check the existance of the 503 document in your docroot