When doing maintenance on a web application, you probably have a custom 503 site, showing your customers that the servers are currently lying on the operating table. At the dynamic ridesharing service flinc, we touch a certain file on our reverse proxies (e.g. using capistrano deploy:web:disable) when maintenance begins. Nginx then serves a static “we’ve disabled the site for maintenance” site, instead of the actual content. But wouldn’t it be nice to test your web application before ...
