Return a specific http status code in Rails

Question

How do you return 503 Service Unavailable in Rails for the entire application?

Also, how do you do the same for specific controllers?

Answer 1

The following works for me:

format.any { render :json => {:response => 'Unable to authenticate' },:status => 401  }

The :response for the HTML response just in case it's accessed from the browser.

The render head 503 does not seem to be working with the above statement.