Moved from local to remote “Service Unavailable Our site is temporarily unavailable. Please try again later.”

Question

I built a site locally and moved it up to a remote host. I am getting a page that says

“Service Unavailable Our site is temporarily unavailable. Please try again later.”

It’s clearly a page coming from Craft so i know the CraftPath is set up right. I have multi-environment variables set up in config/general.php that seem to be working, i.e. it still works locally and there is a stylesheet being called properly in the error page so i think my {baseUrl} is working. I also have them in config/db.php and at least, the local connection is being made. I have devMode => true and it's not giving any hints...

So i uploaded /craft and /public and imported the database. I’m currently using an IP address because the Url is in use and will be moved later on. I had the IP set up so i get to my /index.php and it seems to go out and find /craft OK.

I don’t have to reinstall craft or anything do i?

The /craft, /public, database, and multi environment variables should do it? Is there some other thing i need to do?

Would a DB connection error be clear?

Answer 1

That error means your site is currently offline. Check in the control panel under Settings->General to see if it's set to offline there. Or maybe you're using the isSystemOn config setting and it's set to off on your production environment there.

Answer 2

I ran into this issue a few times, turns out I had to change htaccess to .htaccess in the public_html/ folder

Answer 3

Might also be worth checking if your Craft is having issues connecting to your DB. I got the same message when I launched a new instance on another domain, but forgot to setup the config.

Answer 4

I recently ran into this issue as well for a site with multiple locales using a multi-environment configuration.

The issue turned out to be that the secondary locales did not have a multi-environment configuration setup in a way that helped identify what environment they were operating in. Updating the secondary locales index.php files to test for the environment and define the CRAFT_ENVIRONMENT variable got things working again.

Answer 5

For what it's worth I found this page after doing a web search for the error message, then realized that I had set everything up on the live server but hadn't imported the database.

Then I realized that when I updated the database password in my .env file I actually had replaced the security key.

So those are other things to check.