django-countdown

Announce planned Django downtime before it starts, then close the site cleanly while it happens — without locking yourself out.

django-countdown gives you two things that work together:

1. A countdown banner injected into your own templates, with a live JS timer counting down to the moment the site closes.
2. A blocking middleware that returns HTTP 503 and renders a branded maintenance page once that moment arrives — except for superusers, who keep browsing so they can finish the work.

Everything is driven by a single database row per Site, which you create from the Django admin or with one command:

$ ./manage.py start_countdown --banner +15m --service +30m \
      --message "Database upgrade" --noinput
✓ Created countdown for example.com.

There is a command for every other verb too — because the moment you need them, the site is usually already closed and the plan is already slipping:

$ ./manage.py show_countdown       # which phase, and how long left?
$ ./manage.py extend_countdown     # it is taking longer than planned
$ ./manage.py shorten_countdown    # it is going faster
$ ./manage.py stop_countdown       # done — reopen the site

Why it exists

Planned downtime is the worst kind of downtime to communicate badly. Users land on a half-broken page mid-deploy, hit error logs, file support tickets, and trust erodes. Announcing the window in advance and serving an honest 503 during it turns an incident into a non-event.

Features

• Pre-maintenance banner

  An ultra-visible banner with a timer that ticks live, injected through a context processor and included wherever you want it.

• Hard cutoff at expiry

  Middleware returns HTTP 503 and renders a maintenance page the moment the countdown lapses — a status code that proxies and crawlers understand.

• Superuser bypass

  Admins keep working through the cutoff so they can finish the job and clear the countdown.

• Bounded or indefinite windows

  Set maintenance_until for auto-recovery, or leave it empty to stay blocked until someone explicitly unblocks.

• Per-Site configuration

  One countdown per domain via django.contrib.sites — multi-tenant projects close one site without touching the rest.

• Translatable

  Every user-visible string goes through gettext; English and Polish catalogs ship with the package.

Where to go next

I want to…	Read
Install and wire it into settings	Installation
See a countdown running in three minutes	Quickstart
Understand who sees what, and when	How it works
Restyle the maintenance page	Blocked page
Script downtime from CI or a deploy hook	Scheduling a countdown
Check on, adjust or end a window already running	Managing a running countdown
Look up a field, setting or template block	Reference

Requirements

Django	3.10	3.11	3.12	3.13	3.14
5.2 LTS	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓
6.0	—	—	✓	✓	✓
6.1	—	—	✓	✓	✓

All eleven cells run in CI on every push. The only runtime dependency is Django itself.

Licence

MIT — see LICENSE.