While you develop your Drupal site you may want to show the public either a simple holding page or keep an older version of the site operational.

You can either develop Drupal in a subdirectory while keeping the site in place, or you can develop Drupal in the webroot and put the holding page or old site in a subdirectory. This page considers the latter approach.

This technique can also be used to display a more friendly message than the standard 'Can't connect to the database' message when your site goes down.

For a module-based approach, see http://drupal.org/project/holding.

Instructions

Create your static holding page(s) and place it in a subdirectory called, for example, 'holding'.

Then add the following lines to your Drupal installation's .htaccess file, below the 'RewriteEngine on' line:

  ##### rewriting for holding page
  RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} mysite\.com [NC]
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/holding [NC]
  RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^drupal [NC]
  RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /holding/$1 [L] 
  ##### end

Replace 'mysite\.com' with the domain name of your own site, escaping the full stops with backslashes, as in the example.

This will redirect visitors of 'mysite.com' to 'mysite.com/holding', without them realising.

To access your Drupal site, you need an alternative domain name. There are two ways to do this.

  • The easiest method is if you have the original domain name for your hosting, such as 'mysite.somehostingcompany.com'. Using this to reach your site will give you the Drupal site rather than the holding site. You may also be able to access your site at your IP like this: http://1.1.1.1/~username
  • Alternatively, create a subdomain called 'drupal' for your site, set to the same webroot as the main domain. The third line in the code snippet above means that visiting 'drupal.mysite.com' won't be redirected to the holding page.

If you get a 403 for the holding site, you'll need to put an .htaccess file in the holding folder, as Drupal's .htaccess only allows index.php as a directory listing. This is all you need for the holding/.htaccess file:

# Set the default handler.
DirectoryIndex index.php index.html

Comments

armyofda12mnkeys’s picture

armyofda12mnkeys commented

I added this to my local VirtualHost setup as it would give errors about 

[Sun Aug 07 12:37:55 2011] [error] [client 127.0.0.1] Directory index forbidden by Options directive: C:/dev/sites/mysite.com/holding/
[Sun Aug 07 12:37:59 2011] [error] [client 127.0.0.1] Request exceeded the limit of 10 internal redirects due to probable configuration errora. Use 'LimitInternalRecursion' to increase the limit if necessary. Use 'LogLevel debug' to get a backtrace., referer: http://mysite.com/index.htm

The main DirectoryIndex setup allows index.php which seems to mess it up so i added another Directory tag for the holding folder

Here is the setup:

<VirtualHost 127.0.0.1:80>
  ServerName mysite.com
  ServerAlias www.mysite.com
  
  DocumentRoot "C:\dev\sites\mysite.com"
  DirectoryIndex index.php index.html index.htm
  ErrorLog "logs/mysite.com.log"
  
  <Directory "C:\dev\sites\mysite.com">
  AllowOverride All  
  Order Allow,Deny
  Allow from all
  </Directory>   

  <Directory "C:\dev\sites\mysite.com\holding">
  DirectoryIndex index.html index.htm
  AllowOverride All  
  Order Allow,Deny
  Allow from all
  </Directory>   
  
</VirtualHost>

my hosts file points to my localhost so i can test this redirect setup:

127.0.0.1	      www.mysite.com
127.0.0.1	      mysite.com

My best guess is that apache thinks the index.php actually does exist at the root web folder of mysite.com and gets confused?, as we trying to only go into the subfolder (without changing the url).

jay_m’s picture

jay_m commented

I had to modify above code to work in my setup. I have Drupal 6.x installed in the root of my server directory and my old static site installed at holding/

I want to continue using the static site while I am finalizing the Drupal design. The .htaccess rules got close but I had to change the last Rewrite Rule

From
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /holding/$1 [L]
To
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /holding$1 [L]

I am not a .htaccess expert so take my experience for what it is worth.