How to do maintenance on a live website (Laravel 8)

Maintenance injects fresh blood into the application.

After deploying your application to production it needs to be maintained. So Laravel makes it easy for you.
To active maintenance mode, you just need to run this command

php artisan down

This will disable your application and show a 503 error page for the user.

By adding a secret key while you enable maintenance mode you can access the application even it’s in maintenance mode

php artisan down --secret="123456789"

https://yourDomain.com/123456789 

What if you want to redirect all requests to a specific route? for doing that just add the flag of redirect while you enable maintenance mode.

php artisan down --redirect=/about

And finally after completing the maintenance run this command to disable maintenance mode & let the user enjoy using your application.

php artisan up

For digging deeper visit: Laravel Maintenance Mode