Kentico 10 upgrade does not use the offline mode settings under the site

Cassandra Snyder asked on November 9, 2017 17:29

I recently upgraded our DEV environment to version 10 from 9 and when the upgrade process started the website should have gone to a maintenance website that we have set up for this purpose. The settings are correct under the offline mode for the site, however instead of showing the site I expected during the upgrade it simply showed a blank screen with the word Offline. I subsequently had to roll back the upgrade on our DEV environment for an unrelated reason, but I am going to be attempting the upgrade again and wanted to know why I didn't see the expected offline site when the upgrade began. We will follow the same process for our Live environment and I do not want just a blank page with the word Offline to show up when I apply the upgrade to Live. I want our maintenance page to show. Going from version 8 to 9 worked correctly. Which brings me to the question of, is there something different in the upgrade package of version 10 that would ignore those settings while the upgrade is happening?

kentico 10 upgrade offline mode

Correct Answer

Brenden Kehren answered on November 9, 2017 17:36

The Offline settings in the Site definition are for when Kentico as a whole is still running. When you perform your upgrade, Kentico cannot have any files being access so it places an App_Offline.html file in the root of the website folder to tell IIS to stop the website. This is needed and the upgrade cannot happen without this. So moving forward, it's probably best to have some sort of redirect or a pointer setup when upgrading your live site because the Kentico application will stop within IIS.

Another option is to create your own custom App_Offline.html and place that in the root of the website. Key is you cannot have any references to the regular Kentico install as they will not work when the site is not running. FOr instance you cannot reference the Kentico stylesheet if it resides in Kentico. You can however use files from the file system like JS files or images without issue.

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Trevor Fayas answered on November 9, 2017 17:35

Upgrading from Kentico 9 to 10 is a little more of a step than from 8 to 9. I don't see anything in documentation concerning this, so i can't say for positive, however having done many upgrades, i cannot recommend you do a major version upgrade on a 'live' site while it is still live. Hotfixes are fine as they are very low risk and don't take a lot of time, however for major upgrades i would highly recommend you initiate a content freeze, pull the site down to a local environment, upgrade, then push the upgraded solution, replacing the old version.

Another option though if you still wish to do it live but have a better offline page, is to not rely on Kentico's offline mode settings and add a custom offline page (say _offline.html) to the root of your site, and then in IIS on your site go to the configuration editor and set the default page to _offline.html.

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