Maintenance Operations

What it does

Two operations manage Laravel's maintenance mode directly from the dashboard:

• Maintenance mode (down): runs php artisan down --secret=<random>. A one-time bypass URL containing the secret is shown once in the output panel — it is never logged or audited.
• Bring online (up): runs php artisan up.

While the application is down, a warning health check (app.maintenance_mode) stays visible, with fix php artisan up.

Why it is useful

Taking a site down for a migration or a deploy, and bringing it back up, is one of the most common operational tasks — and one of the easiest to botch from a terminal under pressure (wrong secret, forgetting to note the bypass URL). This gives you both actions as confirmed buttons, with the bypass URL handed to you directly.

How to configure it

// config/opconsole.php
'actions' => [
    'down' => true,
    'up' => true,
],
'maintenance' => [
    'allow_console' => true,
],

maintenance.allow_console adds the OpConsole route prefix to Laravel's PreventRequestsDuringMaintenance::except() list, so the console itself (still behind authentication and Gates) stays reachable while the rest of the application is down — this is how you can press Bring online at all. It's ignored when route.prefix is empty, because exempting /* would exempt the entire application from maintenance mode; a console mounted at the root follows maintenance mode like every other route in that case.

How to use it

Press Maintenance mode, confirm (medium risk — single confirmation, not hold-to-confirm), and copy the bypass URL from the output panel before navigating away; it's shown only once. Press Bring online when you're ready to restore traffic.

Security considerations

• The secret is generated randomly per run and never persisted to the audit log or anywhere else readable later — if you lose it, generate a new one by running down again.
• Both actions go through the same Artisan action pipeline as every other operation: confirmed, locked, bounded, and audited (the fact that maintenance was toggled is audited; the secret itself is not).
• Map down/up to a narrower Gate than runOpConsoleActions if you want maintenance-mode control reserved for a smaller group — see Authentication & Authorization.

Limitations

• Like every Artisan action, down/up are refused on a runtime without pcntl from the browser (see Execution environments) — run them from the CLI instead on such hosts.
• Inside a Swoole worker, these are refused by default because their timeout mechanism would interrupt the worker itself — see Octane & Swoole.

Troubleshooting

• Site stays unreachable after pressing "Bring online": confirm the operation actually succeeded in History — a runtime without pcntl, or a Swoole guard refusal, would leave the application down.
• Lost the bypass secret: there's no way to recover it; run Maintenance mode again to generate a fresh one (this also resets the down state, so only do this if the app is still down or you're fine toggling it).