Maintenance
Most maintenance tasks in Contao are automated so that you can concentrate on your real work. Sometimes, however, it might be necessary to manually start the system maintenance tasks that are otherwise performed automatically.
Maintenance mode
This feature allows you to put the Contao instance into a “maintenance mode”. While this mode is active, the front end is not reachable for regular visitors. Instead an appropriate message is shown. The back end is accessible as usual, logged in back end users can bypass the maintenance mode using the front end preview.
This mode is useful, if more in depth work needs to be done in the back end, the effects of which should not be immediately visible in the front end.
Crawler
Pages are automatically indexed when you access them in the front end (unless you are logged into the backend at the same time), so you don’t normally have to worry about the search index. However, if you have updated many pages at once, it is more convenient to rebuild the search index manually than to call up all changed pages one by one in the browser.
The crawler can also check for broken links, when enabled.
In versions prior to Contao 4.9 this section is called Rebuild search index. The feature of being able to check for broken links is not available there.
This feature is available in Contao 4.9 and later.
The crawler can also be executed directly from the command line:
$ vendor/bin/contao-console contao:crawl
However since there is no HTTP request context available on the console, a domain must be defined. For this reason you should always define the domain in the website root settings, even if you only use one domain in your Contao instance. Alternatively you can define the default domain for the console via configuration parameters:
# config/parameters.yml
parameters:
router.request_context.host: 'example.org'
router.request_context.scheme: 'https'
You can find more information in the Symfony Routing Documentation.
Indexing protected pages
To allow the search of protected pages, you must first enable this feature in the backend settings. Use this feature very carefully and always exclude personalized pages from the search!
Since Contao 4.9 this is enabled in the application configuration:
# config/config.yml
contao:
search:
# Enable indexing of protected pages.
index_protected: true
Then create a new front end user and allow them to access the protected pages to be indexed.
Later during the search, the protected pages will of course only appear in the results if the registered front end user is allowed to access them.
Basic Authentication
Before a website is published it will often be protected via “Basic Authentication” on the live or staging environment. In order for the
crawler to be able to still access the site in this case the username and password needs to be defined in the configuration. The value
of this configuration option must follow the format username:password:
# config/config.yaml
contao:
crawl:
default_http_client_options:
auth_basic: 'username:password'
You can find more configuration options for the HTTP client of the crawler in the Symfony documentation.
Purge data
In addition to the user-generated content, Contao stores various system data that is used the search or for restoring deleted records or previous versions. You can manually clean this data, for example to remove old thumbnails or to update the XML sitemaps after a change in the page structure.
