Generator-Z-Maintenance
Installation and Usage
run npm install generator-z-maintenance -g
After that, you can run yo z-maintenance from a project to start the
generator.
Description
This generator will provide a basic maintenance.html file, and a set of .htaccess rules, to handle maintenance on a site.
Maintenance can then be activated by uploading an empty "maintenance" file to the project's public folder.
Configuration
Since the some paths had to be provided as absolutes, every new environment will need adjustments.
So for example for the site: "http://site.com", the needed adjustmens would be to replace every occurances of "public_path/" to an empty string.
Another example would be, if a developer has the project under the "localhost/a/long/path/project" path. The developer then must replace every occurances of "public_path/" to "a/long/path/project/public_path/".
Collaboration, different environments
The way the .htaccess file needs to be configured means that it can not be version controlled, since every environment needs a little tweak for every developer. A way to store the htaccess file in the repository, is to save it as ".htaccess.dist" (Think of it as a template file.), so that every developer must "implement" it as ".htaccess", having the latter ignored by the VCS.
This may seem to be a lot of work, but it's a well estabilished way to collaborate on a project. (Just don't deploy "*.dist" files to production environment.)
To see how the Symfony2 Framework uses this pattern, read this article about the configuration.
For an easy to use setup page, which helps implementing these "*.dist" files, please consider using this generator.