Enabling Magento Maintenance Mode

Heads up! This article was written over 14 years ago. While it may still be helpful, please verify any information, as my perspectives and practices may have evolved.

Magento 1.4 introduced a method for quickly enabling maintenance mode on a running store. To enabled maintenance mode simply create a file called maintenance.flag file in your Magento root.

The maintenance mode template is found in the errors/default/503.phtml. Integration with the “Allowed IPs” in the developer section of the configuration section would be nice but, of course, there is a way you can hack it. Without this hack maintenance mode is enabled for everyone, even if you have an admin session.