wagtail-holdingpage

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A widget for Wagtail's admin that gives you an admin interface to control turning 'holding page mode' on and off for your website while you deploy and test updates.

When 'holding page mode' is on, visitors will see the holding page template instead of the normal site content, and the response code will be 503 Service Unavailable. Holding page responses are decorated with Django's never_cache decorator.

Use

When holding page mode is on, it will display a nice-looking maintenance page, but optionally allow some pages to behave as normal, or allow the site to behave as normal for admins. In your settings you can exclude certain URLs (eg /admin) from being affected.

Installation

python3 -m pip install wagtail-holdingpage

Add "wagtail_holdingpage.apps.WagtailHoldingpageAppConfig" to INSTALLED_APPS.

Add "wagtail_holdingpage.middleware.HoldingPageMiddleware" to MIDDLEWARE, normally below any session and authentication middleware.

Set HOLDINGPAGE_TEMPLATE_NAME in your Django settings to the path of the template you want to use for the holding page. Alternatively, override the default template "wagtail_holdingpage/holding_page.html".

Optionally, add the following settings to your settings file, for example:

HOLDINGPAGE_ALLOWED_URL_PATTERNS = [
    "^/admin/*",
    "^/robots.txt",
    "/favicon.ico",
]

Optionally, create additional hooks to allow certain requests to bypass the holding page. See hooks.py for an example. HoldingpageSettings allows you to control whether the allow_staff hook is enabled via the Wagtail admin. Alternatively, you can configure it to be always enabled via HOLDINGPAGE_HOOKS (overrides the admin setting).

HOLDINGPAGE_HOOKS = [
    "myapp.hooks.my_hook",
]

Optionally, set HOLDINGPAGE_REDIRECT_URL in your Django settings to specify a URL to which visitors should be 302 redirected when the holding page is active. This can be useful if the holding page is external, but note that visitors may remain on that redirect destination and simply refresh it and so they'll never know when holding page mode is turned off. You might want to redirect them back to the main site once the holding page mode is turned off.

HOLDINGPAGE_REDIRECT_URL = "https://otherdomain.com/maintenance/"