Disable a Site in Liferay and Display a Static Page Through Nginx

In our case, multiple sites are hosted on a single app server and web server(Nginx). The requirement was to disable one of the sites, and a result of hitting the disabled site should be a custom page displayed with the message that the site is unavailable.

For doing this, there are three actions to be performed:

• Disable the app from the app server
• Avoid it from hitting the app server form the web server
• Display a custom static HTML page instead of the default nginx page.

To disable the site:

Disable from Liferay (App Server)

• Login to Liferay application using the admin credentials
• Goto Control Panel => Sites

• Disable the required site by clicking on three dots located besides the site and then on Deactivate.

 Disable from nginx (Web Server)

• Login to your web server and open the terminal
• Go to the following path: /etc/nginx/sites-enabled  or  /etc/nginx/conf.d
• Open the config file of the specific domain you need to disable.
• Comment the line containing proxy_pass and add the following to disable all the URLs of that domain present in the location tag:

 if (!-e $request_uri) {
       	rewrite ^ / permanent;
 }

Display a static HTML page:

• Put your custom HTML content in index.html (This file has the default page of nginx) file present at the following path: /usr/share/nginx/html/  or  /var/www/html (Based on your server config, the location of index.html file might be in any one of the location).
• Restart the nginx server:  sudo service nginx restart

Conclusion:

In this tutorial, you learned how to disable a site from Liferay, where the default Nginx page is located, and how to change it by using any text editor