Put Drupal Sites in Maintenance Mode Manually
Drupal allows to set a website offline with a few clicks via the admin interfacte.
However, we’ve seen situations where the admin interface becomes unavailable, often via a white screen of death.
In this tutorial, I’m going to show you a manual way to force your Drupal 7 site in maintenance mode.
Step #1. Edit the settings.php file
- Edit the file sites/default/settings.php file, using a FTP client or through cPanel:
- At the very end of settings.php, add the code below:
{codecitation php}$conf[‘maintenance_mode’] = 1;{/codecitation}
Step #2. End result
Your site will now display the “Site under maintenance” page:
Step #3. Put your site back online
Remove the line of code from Step 1, or change the value to 0 to put your site online again:
{codecitation php}$conf[‘maintenance_mode’] = 0;{/codecitation}
Eliminate the type of rule from Phase # 1, or modify the value to 0 to put your site online again:
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Sadly, this doesn’t appear to work in Drupal 9.2.7 where I have exactly the situation you describe: a maintenance page and nothing, not even ?q=user works.
Also, if I run update (having allowed that via settings.php) when the update is finished, only the “front page” option is available – no access to administration pages.
The recommended solution is drush but that requires SSH or editing a blob in the database.
It used to be so simple: go into the DB, change a flag from 1 to 0 and get on your way.
So much progress isn’t. 🙁
Yes – you are correct unfortunately.
Drush is definitely the way to go on any Drupal site though – it’s worth putting a site where you can use it I think (if you can)…