I have an apex command button as below calling a custom controller method

<apex:commandButton value="Save" id="Save" action="{!save}" onclick="this.disabled=true;"/>

The method saves the item and navigate to another page. It is not a partial page update call.

I would like to disable button after the first click. I tried using onclick and calling a javascript to set the disabled status as true. When I use onclick even to make the javascript call, the button becomes disabled, but the save method on the controller is not being called.

I changed the button onclick event  to just alert 'hi' as below and it works. It alerts and then also makes the method call

<apex:commandButton value="Save" id="Save" action="{!save}" onclick="alert('hi');"/> 

But when I added the code to disable the button too as shown below, it stops calling the controller method.

<apex:commandButton value="Add Item(s)" id="addItem" action="{!addItems}" onclick="alert('hi');this.disabled=true;"/>

Is there a different way to solve this?