I am trying to use a test for the existence of a file to return a error page with a 503 Temporarily Unavailable response code. My configuration is below. The problem is that it does not work. I can see the custom error page, but the HTTP status code is 200, not the desired 503.

If I change the if directive to this:

if (-f $document_root/system/maintenance.html) { rewrite ^(.*)$ /system/maintenance.html; # No last return 503; }

I start getting a 503 HTTP status code, but the content is not my custom error page, but rather the default 503 response compiled into the nginx server.

Am I doing something terribly wrong? I would really like to see my custom page with a real 503 HTTP status code.

Thanks for any help, Douglas A. Seifert

nginx.conf:

-------------------------------------------------- # user and group to run as #user www www;

# number of nginx workers worker_processes 6;

# pid of nginx master process pid /usr/local/www/nginx.pid;

# Number of worker connections. 1024 is a good default events { worker_connections 1024; }

# start the http module where we config http access. http { # pull in mime-types. You can break out your config # into as many include's as you want to make it cleaner include /usr/local/nginx/conf/mime.types;

# set a default type for the rare situation that # nothing matches from the mimie-type include default_type application/octet-stream;

# configure log format log_format main '$remote_addr - $remote_user [$time_local] ' '"$request" $status $body_bytes_sent "$http_referer" ' '"$http_user_agent" "$http_x_forwarded_for"';

# main access log access_log /usr/local/www/log/nginx_access.log main;

# main error log error_log /usr/local/www/log/nginx_error.log debug;

# no sendfile on OSX sendfile on;

# These are good default values. tcp_nopush on; tcp_nodelay off; # output compression saves bandwidth gzip on; gzip_http_version 1.0; gzip_comp_level 2; gzip_proxied any; gzip_types text/plain text/html text/css application/x- javascript text/xml application/xml application/xml+rss text/javascript;

server {

# port to listen on. Can also be set to an IP:PORT listen *:8080;

# Set the max size for file uploads to 50Mb client_max_body_size 50M;

# sets the domain[s] that this vhost server requests for server_name .foo.com *;

# doc root root /usr/local/www/test;

# vhost specific access log access_log /usr/local/www/log/nginx.vhost.access.log main;

# this rewrites all the requests to the maintenance.html # page if it exists in the doc root. This is for capistrano's # disable web task if (-f $document_root/system/maintenance.html) { rewrite ^(.*)$ /system/maintenance.html last; return 503; }

location / { root /usr/local/www/test; }

error_page 500 502 504 /500.html; error_page 503 /503.html; }