Question

So I use the following for to force my site into maintenance mode while updating certain things:

# MAINTENANCE-PAGE REDIRECT
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
 RewriteEngine on
 RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} !^23\.1\.12\.167
 RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !/maintenance.html$ [NC]
 RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !\.(jpe?g?|png|gif) [NC]
 RewriteRule .* /maintenance.html [R=302,L]
</IfModule>

This has worked well, but now I have the situation when in maintenance mode that I wish to exclude certain dir’s from being sent to the maintenance.html and rather have them display their normal contents.

So it would be something like:

root/
   .htaccess
    maintenance.html
    index.html
    everything.else.html
    /do_not_display_me
    /display_me_always

Not sure if this is possible from the root level .htaccess or if I’m going to have to get crafty with sub-dir .htaccess files, any help is appreciated.

Answer 1

This should do the job. It tells Apache to not to rewrite those folders (which makes maintenance rules to be omitted as rewrite chain will never reach them).

# activate rewrite engine
RewriteEngine on

# always allow these folders
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/display_me_always [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/another_folder [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/even_more_folders
RewriteRule .+ - [L]

# maintenance rules
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} !^23\.1\.12\.167
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !/maintenance.html$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !\.(jpe?g?|png|gif) [NC]
RewriteRule .* /maintenance.html [R=302,L]

1. Letter case matters, so if you need to match mixed case spelling insert NC, into [OR].
2. You may consider adding slash / at the end of folder names if you have files in root folder with the same names.