Maintenance Mode

⚠️ Configured in Panel → Settings → Platform and requires the Manage Platform Settings permission.

Maintenance mode takes your public website offline without stopping Pano. While it is on, visitors never reach your theme — Pano serves its own page straight from the backend instead. Your admin panel, your connected Minecraft servers and the panel API keep working; public API endpoints answer 503.

Because Pano renders that page itself, maintenance mode works with every theme and needs no theme support. You can install, switch, update or outright break your theme while it is on.

Turning it on

1. Go to Panel → Settings → Platform → Maintenance Mode.
2. Flip Enable Maintenance Mode and type your account password. Taking the site offline — and putting it back up — is re-authenticated like the other critical settings. The rest of the card saves without a password.
3. Adjust the settings below and press Save.

It applies on the very next request: no restart, and your own panel session is never interrupted. While it is on, every panel page shows a banner you cannot dismiss.

⚠️ Maintenance mode is inert until your installation is set up. During the setup wizard it does nothing.

Settings

• Who Can Bypass — the permission node a user must hold. Leave it empty for the panel access permission (pano.panel.access.panel), which is what the placeholder shows. Fill it in — admins.test, say — to let in people who should see the site but never the panel. The node is matched literally and may not contain *.
• Show Login Button — puts a login button on the maintenance page.
• Custom Login URL — a secret address that serves the login form instead, for example /staff-entrance. Available only while the login button is off; leave it empty and the form stays on /login.
• Show Site Logo — shows the logo from Panel → Settings → Website.
• Edit Maintenance Page — the page source editor. See Editing the page.
• Banned IP Addresses — the list the maintenance login has locked out. See Blocked addresses.

Show Login Button	Custom Login URL	URL that serves the login form
On	(ignored, field greyed out)	/login
Off	(empty)	/login
Off	/staff-entrance	/staff-entrance

Anonymous visitors who open /panel — or a bookmarked link under it — are redirected to whichever address serves the form, so a saved panel link still leads somewhere useful.

What people see

Visitors get the maintenance page with 503 Service Unavailable and Retry-After, which search engines read as "temporarily down, come back later" rather than "gone". Nothing of your theme is served, and the page carries no theme assets, so it renders even when no theme can start.

Staff who may bypass get the same page plus a Skip maintenance mode button. Pressing it hands them the real theme — but only until the page is reloaded: the skip is spent by the navigation it was granted for, so F5, a new tab or a typed URL brings the maintenance page back. That is deliberate; nobody should forget the site is closed. /panel is never blocked for a panel-access holder either way, and API access follows the permission, not the skip.

The permission is re-checked on the server on every request, so revoking it takes access away immediately — though a change can take up to a minute to propagate through Pano's permission cache.

The login

The maintenance login is deliberately minimal: username or e-mail, and a password. Login plugins do not run here — no captcha, no 2FA, no social or premium login — because the whole point is a door that still opens when a plugin is what broke. Those plugins are back the moment maintenance mode is off.

It never says whether a username exists, and it is rate-limited per address.

Blocked addresses

Three failed logins from one address are tolerated; the next failure blocks it permanently. Blocked visitors get the maintenance page with no form, just a notice. A successful login resets the counter.

• Manage the list from Banned IP Addresses at the bottom of the card — remove one, or Clear All.
• Loopback (127.0.0.1, ::1) is never counted or blocked, so terminal access to the machine is always a way in.
• Bans live in maintenance/maintenance-mode-banned-ips.json and survive restarts. Every automatic block is written to the panel activity log.

⚠️ Behind a reverse proxy, set server.trusted-proxies — see the server configuration. Left empty, Pano ignores X-Forwarded-For entirely and every request looks like it comes from the proxy, so one visitor's failures would block everyone.

Editing the page

Edit Maintenance Page opens a source editor with a live preview underneath and one tab per file. All five live in the folder Pano runs from and are plain Handlebars templates — there is no rich-text editor, you write the markup.

Tab	File
Page	maintenance/page.hbs — the whole document
Login form	maintenance/login.hbs
Login button	maintenance/login-button.hbs
Skip button	maintenance/skip.hbs
Notice	maintenance/notice.hbs

The preview follows the open tab and renders the page state that block actually appears in, so you always look at the thing you are editing. A broken directive shows up there rather than on the live site.

Pressing Save writes the files and sets custom-page = true: Pano stops composing the page from title, message-html and custom-css, and a Pano update that ships a new default design no longer replaces your files. Reset to default restores all five and turns that back off.

The page carries these slots; leave one out and the feature it brings does not appear.

Slot	What it becomes
{{{noticeBlock}}}	The notice banner, when there is one
{{{loginBlock}}}	The login button, or the login form on a login URL
{{{skipBlock}}}	The Skip maintenance mode button
{{{creditBlock}}}	The Created with Pano line
{{logoUrl}} · {{lang}}	Site logo URL, platform language code
{{defaultTitle}} · {{{defaultMessage}}}	Pano's own copy, in the platform language

The blocks have their own variables — labels, {{action}}, {{url}}, {{text}} and so on. Keep {{nonce}} and {{nonceField}} in the login form: they carry the same-origin check that stops another site from getting your visitors' addresses blocked.

Every label and message comes from Pano's translations and follows Panel → Settings → Platform → Preferences → Language. Rewrite any of them in Panel → Translations under the PLATFORM type, under maintenance..

Configuration keys

maintenance {
  enabled = false

  # Node required to bypass. Empty = pano.panel.access.panel. No wildcards.
  bypass-permission-node = ""

  show-login-button = true

  # Empty = /login. Only honoured while show-login-button is false.
  custom-login-url = ""

  show-site-logo = true

  # Used to compose the default page; not editable from the panel.
  title = ""
  message-html = ""
  custom-css = ""

  # Wrong-password attempts from one IP before it is blocked. 0 disables blocking.
  max-login-attempts = 3

  # True once the page has been written from the panel editor; see "Editing the page".
  custom-page = false
}

You can move the folder at launch, like Pano's other folders:

java -Dpano.maintenanceFolder=/var/lib/pano/maintenance -jar Pano-<version>.jar

Locked yourself out?

In order of preference:

1. Log in from the machine Pano runs on — loopback is never blocked.
2. Set enabled = false in the maintenance block of config.conf. Picked up in about five seconds, no restart, and no password needed — this is also the way out if the panel switch is refusing yours.
3. Clear the blocks — from the panel, or delete maintenance/maintenance-mode-banned-ips.json.
4. Reset the page — delete maintenance/page.hbs and Pano regenerates it.
5. Forgot the custom login URL, or locked out by the node? Read or clear custom-login-url and bypass-permission-node in config.conf.

⚠️ Back up before large manual edits to config.conf. See the Configuration Guide.