When configuring a new site or upgrading an existing one, you may want to allow yourself full access but keep other people out temporarily. Scoop's ``safe mode'' allows Superuser accounts and those with the perm bypass_safe_mode normal access, and returns a 503 service temporarily unavailable to everybody else, logged in or not.
To turn ``safe mode'' on, the variable safe_mode should be set to 1. To return the site to normal operation when you're ready to open to the world, it should be set to 0.
Apache can be easily configured to return a custom error message along with the 503 error by including the following line in the apache configuration file:
ErrorDocument 503 /oops.html
That command will return the file /oops.html with the 503 error code. You can put any content in the file, such as explaining what's up with the server and when you expect to have the site back to normal.
If you prefer not to modify your apache configuration, you can put the full URL of an error page in the variable safe_mode_redirect. If this variable is used, Scoop will send a 302 Redirect to send the visitor to the error page. If you use this, make sure the URL of your error page is not a page controlled by Scoop, otherwise visitors will end up in a never-ending redirect loop as safe mode is triggered every time they try to access the error page.
Scoop will process logins before determining whether or not to let you in when safe mode is active, so if you put a login form on the error page you will be able to get into your site after your login expires.