How to Bring Down an Emergence Instance for Maintenance

If you want to push updates to an emergence site while keeping the site down to the world you can use the following trick:

At the bottom of /php-config/Site.config.php add the following statement:

if (empty($_COOKIE['devcookie'])) {
    header('HTTP/1.1 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable');
    die('Please check back in a few moments');
}

Then in the browser you’d like to do your edits in, open up the javascript console and manually set your cookie:

document.cookie="devcookie=1";

Now only users with this specific cookie set will be able to access the site. When you’re done remove the Site.config.php statement and you’re good to go.