Everything You Need to Know About Laravel's Maintenance Mode

✨ Introduction

Laravel's Maintenance Mode is a feature that helps manage temporary disruptions during website updates or maintenance tasks. When activated, it displays a customizable maintenance page to users, ensuring they are informed while minimizing disruption.

👩‍💻 Usage

The maintenance mode can be enabled within a second using the following artisan command:

1php artisan down

Of course, we can disable maintenance mode using the reverse command of the above command:

1php artisan up

But many developers miss out on other features it offers. 😥

Feature: Send Refresh HTTP Header

This feature will send a Refresh HTTP header with all maintenance mode requests. It automatically refreshes the web page in given seconds.

You can provide the refresh option when executing the down command:

1php artisan down --refresh=30

Feature: Send Retry-After HTTP Header

You can also provide a retry option to the down command, which will be set as the Retry-After HTTP header's value, but browsers usually ignore this header:

1php artisan down --retry=60

⏭️ Bypassing Maintenance Mode

Sometimes, many developers like to use the website even in maintenance mode for some reasons, this is where the secret option comes into play.

The secret option will take a secret token that we provide to bypass maintenance mode as shown below:

1php artisan down --secret="1630542a-246b-4b66-afa1-dd72a4c43515"

If you are in the maintaince mode, you can now navigate to the application's URL with the secret token:

1https://example.com/1630542a-246b-4b66-afa1-dd72a4c43515

If you want to let Laravel generate a secret token for you, you can use the following command:

1php artisan down --with-secret

💅 Pre-Rendering the Maintenance Mode View

Well, even with maintenance mode enabled, users still face some errors while updating your Composer dependencies or other infrastructure components.

The reason is that a significant part of Laravel needs to be initialized to determine that the application is under maintenance mode.

We can avoid this problem by using a pre-rendered template, because this view is rendered before the application's dependencies are loaded.

To do that, you may use the render option with the down command:

1php artisan down --render="errors::503"

↪️ Redirecting Maintenance Mode Requests

If you would like to redirect all maintainance requests to a specific URL, you may use the redirect option with the down command:

1php artisan down --redirect="https://example.com"

⚠️ Maintenance Mode and Queues

When your application in maintenance mode, Laravel does not handle queued jobs, these jobs will continue when the application goes live again.

I hope this helps! See you in the next post!