[dangerlibrary]

You still need to stop the existing web server to get spark to take over port 80, and restart it when you are done, so it's not quite that simple.

Also, it's not hard to keep a maintenance conf file around, pointing to a different directory. At least, it's certainly no harder than downloading a second web server. Then it's just "sudo ln /etc/sites-available/maintenance /etc/sites-enabled/conf"

[rif]

You are so right, still I had a need for such a little tool and I don't regret any of it's 48 lines of code so far :)

[theonewolf]

The way I'd do this is have front-end load balancers just re-direct to a nginx configured just for this purpose.