How to Enable Maintenance Mode in Magento 1 and 2?

Are you developing, updating or fixing your Magento store?

If yes, then it is suggested to put your Magento store in maintenance mode.

It serves a temporary error notification to your visitors and asks them to come back later as you are working on your website. 

Although, authorized IP addresses can still view the store normally.

This article explains how to put your Magento store in maintenance mode.

Enable Maintenance Mode in Magento 1 and 2

1. Enable maintenance mode for Magento 1

• Enable the maintenance mode in Magento 1 by setting the maintenance.flag
• Allow access to specific IPs in maintenance mode

2. Enable maintenance mode for Magento 2

• Enable the maintenance mode in Magento 2 by setting the maintenance.flag
• Allow access to specific IPs in maintenance mode

3. Serve a custom error message when in maintenance mode

Enable Maintenance Mode for Magento 1

To enable maintenance mode for Magento 1, you have to create maintenance.flag file inside the webroot (/data/web/public/maintenance.flag).

You can also make use of n98-magerun to put on maintenance mode-

n98-magerun sys: maintenance

To enable/disable Magento maintenance mode, follow the given steps:

1. Log in to your Magento administrator account via SSH.
2. Go to the directory where Magento is installed. Type cd ~/public_html
3. Open the index.php file in your text editor.
4. You have to create maintenance.flag file inside the webroot (/data/web/public/maintenance.flag).

If your site is set to maintenance mode on, an error message like below will appear on the screen-

Allow access to specific IPs in maintenance mode in Magento 1

If you are working on your Magento store while it is maintenance mode, then you and your developer must be able to access the store. You can give access to specific IPs by opening the index.php file and change the following code to-

if (file_exists($maintenanceFile)) { 
include_once dirname(FILE) . '/errors/503.php'; 
exit;

TO

$ip = $_SERVER[‘REMOTE_ADDR’];
$allowed_ips = array(‘1.2.3.4’, ‘3.4.5.6’);
if (file_exists($maintenanceFile) && !in_array ($ip, $allowed_ips)) { 
include_once dirname(__FILE__) . ‘/errors/503.php’;    
exit;}

Note:- Change the IPs 1.2.3.4 and 2.3.4.5 to the IP addresses you want to give access to.

Enable Maintenance Mode for Magento 2

To enable maintenance mode for Magento 1, you have to create maintenance.flag file inside the var/ directory.  

Magento detects maintenance mode as follows:-

• If var/.maintenance.flag does not exist, maintenance mode is off.
• Maintenance mode is on if var/.maintenance.IP exists.

To enable/disable Magento maintenance mode, follow the given steps:

1. Log in to your Magento administrator account via SSH.
2. Go to the directory where Magento is installed. 
3. Open the index.php file in your text editor.
4. You have to create maintenance.flag file inside the var/ directory. 

touch /data/web/magento2/var/.maintenance.flag

If your site is set to maintenance mode on, an error message will appear on the screen.

Allow access to specific IPs in maintenance mode in Magento 2

Use the bin/magento CLI tool to add specific addresses:-

cd ~/magento2
chmod +x bin/magento
bin/magento maintenance:enable —ip=1.2.3.4 —ip=2.3.4.5

When the IP addresses are set in the .maintenance.ip file, you can use n98-magerun to achieve the same:

n98-magerun2 sys:maintenance —on
n98-magerun2 sys:maintenance —off

Serve a custom error message when in Maintenance mode

If you don’t like the message that is visible to the users when your Magento store is in Maintenance mode, then you can customize it.  For this, you have to add some layout files in the directory from where error pages are served.

For Magento 1- /data/web/public/errors1

For Magento 2- /data/web/magento2/pub/errors

It is not recommended to change make changes directly in the default directory, therefore, first, copy the default directory to another directory.

Magento 1:

cd /data/web/public/errorscp -rv default custom/

Magento 2:

cd /data/web/magento2/errors
cp -rv default custom/

Now run the following command to copy local.xml.sample to local.xml

cp local.xml.sample local.xml

Now change <skin>default</skin> to <skin>custom</skin> in both local.xml and design.xml

editor local.xml design.xml

After this change, the content for error pages will be served from /errors/custom rather than from /errors/default.

Now you are ready to put your Magento store on Maintenance mode.

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