NGiNX Dynamic Maintenance Page

Code for dynamic generation of the HTML file (via symlink)

This suggestion is more performant than having nginx read the contents of a file on each request.

 if [ -s maintenance_file.txt ]; then ln -s `cat maintenance_file.txt`
maintenance.html; elif [ -f maintenance.html ]; then rm maintenance.html; fi

NGiNX Directives

server {
    ...
    if (-f $document_root/system/maintenance.html) {
        rewrite  ^(.*)$  /system/maintenance.html last;
        break;
    }
    if (-f $document_root/system/down_for_a_while.html) {
        rewrite  ^(.*)$  /system/down_for_a_while.html last;
        break;
    }
    ...
}