Apache Coming Soon Page

Posted by Miles Evans

Alright I hinted at this tip in an earlier article and since a friend of mine was asking I decided I would detail quickly how I handle a ‘coming soon’ page for my web server. Feel free to customize or expand on it but this is the basic principle behind how to do this in Apache. I am sure there are much more clever ways to do this and this IS a kludge.

This tip is useful because it is easy to make the mistake of having the first container in your Apache httpd.conf file point to a website on the server. So this means if you point a new domain to your server, say one you just bought, users will see this first containers website. What if your lazy and forget to add this new domain to httpd.conf? Duplicate content penalties. And who likes that? Nobody!

Ok so you just bought your domain name and have pointed the zone file to your server. Open httpd.conf and find near the bottom the file where the container begins and put something like this as the FIRST entry:

<VirtualHost *>
DocumentRoot "/usr/local/apache/sites/default_site"
ServerName www.templocation.com
LogFormat "%h %l %u %t \"%r\" %>s %b \"%{Referer}i\" \"%{User-Agent}i\""
TransferLog "|/usr/local/apache/bin/rotatelogs /dev/null"
ErrorLog "|/usr/local/apache/bin/rotatelogs /dev/null"
</VirtualHost>

I usually make the website in /usr/local/apache/sites/default_site some type of ‘COMING SOON’ page that can be generic for any domain name. I also push the logs to /dev/null as I don’t care who is hitting this temp space.

Alright this is obviously nothing groundbreaking but avoiding accidental duplicate content penalties is the point I am trying to get across.

Oh and for the geeks drooling over my /etc/motd (pictured above) here ya go.

Posted Feb 17, 2006 at 01:10 AM | Permalink | Trackback URL | Del.icio.us | DIGG!