Is it possible to take a Drupal site offline using Drush?

Is it possible to take a Drupal site offline using Drush?

theunraveler's solution is the best if you're running a single site. We were running a very large multisite drupal installation, with hundreds of sites. Taking them offline that way via drush takes several seconds per site which was unacceptable. The fastest way to take a site offline is to break the db connection by for example renaming the settings.php file. Then just assign a default theme that has a basic template that doesn't require the db, saying "Site Offline" or something. After upgrading you can just repair the settings.php file and you're good to go.

Yep. `drush vset site_offline 1` will set it offline, then `drush vdel site_offline` will bring it back.

Alternatively, you can check out my [Maintenance File module][1] on drupal.org, which will set your site to offline if it finds a specific file in the directory.


[1]:

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Just in case anyone needs to do this with Drupal 7, the commands are:

drush vset maintenance_mode 1 --yes # Take site offline
drush vset maintenance_mode 0 --yes # Put site back online

It also helps to add a little `drush cc all` after each of those commands to ensure that the change appears instantaneous to users.

With a site alias on D7:

drush @site_alias -y vset maintenance_mode 1 # Take site offline
drush @site_alias -y vset maintenance_mode 0 # Take site online

It's quite easy in fact, simply set the variable of maintenance mode to 1 (0 to restore default value):

drush vset maintenance_mode 1

Drupal 6

drush vset site_offline 1

Drupal 7

drush vset maintenance_mode 1