Multi-site maintenance: Global off-line; Per site off-line

By iantresman on 29 Apr 2010 at 12:32 UTC

When running a multi-site installation, how can I optionally:

Place all sites globally into offline maintenance mode, so I can do a core update?
Place only one site off-line, so I can updates its custom modules?

Comments

Essentially setting a site

cog.rusty commented 29 April 2010 at 13:22

Essentially setting a site off-line means setting the variable 'site_offline' to 1 in the site's database in the 'variable' table. Normally this is done in the settings/site-maintenance page of each site, but you could do it directly in the database.

If you find this easier, you can add a $conf['site_offline']=1; line at the end of each site's settings.php file, to override the value of the variable.

If the sites are too many, it shouldn't be very hard to write a script which makes the changes either to the databases or to the settings.php files of the sites that you want, and another one to reverse the changes.

Thanks for that. I was hoping

iantresman commented 29 April 2010 at 17:17

Thanks for that. I was hoping that the Drupal core "default" site might override all the other multi-sites. This sounds like it is best suited to a module, as I don't fancy doing this manually.

I'll see whether the "Multi-site how-tos" gives some clues.

I've subsequently notice that the upgrade process is not as simple as I thought, hoping that updating the core default installation would update all the other multi-sites, but it seems that you still have to run update.php on each one. Kind of defeats the object.

True, each site's database

cog.rusty commented 29 April 2010 at 17:27

True, each site's database must be updated. If you have shell access to your server, you may want to check the drush module (not exactly a module, rather a multipurpose script for managing drupal sites). It updates sites in an instant.

http://drupal.org/project/drush
http://drupal.org/node/477684 -- Documentation page.

Domain Access module

iantresman commented 29 April 2010 at 20:33

The Domain Access module might be a solution, "a suite of modules that provide tools for running a group of affiliated sites from one Drupal installation"