Creating a web page on a campus Unix computer

Here's a description of how anyone with a CCSO Unix account (ie. ux1, students, ...) can create a Web page that can be accessed from any Web browser (ie. Mosaic, Netscape, ...)

Create an HTML file with whatever Unix text editor you're comfortable with, or create the text file on your personal computer and transfer (FTP) it into your Unix account. Let's say it is called test.html

Then follow the following five steps. Don't type the stuff in (parens).


mkdir  ~/public_html      (Makes a directory in your home directory for WWW pages)
chmod  755  ~/public_html                (Makes it world readable/executable)
chmod  711  ~                            (Make your HOME executable)
mv  ~/test.html  ~/public_html/test.html (Puts test.html into the right place)
chmod  644  ~/public_html/test.html      (Makes the document readable)

Now, your URL is:

http://staff.uiuc.edu/~j-levin/test.html

where staff is replaced by the particular computer cluster your account is on (for students, it is students), and j-levin is replaced by your own account name.

Basically, any document you want to serve must be in the public_html directory we created above; this is for security reasons. You don't put the public_html in your URL. This is non-intuitive, but it's the way things work.

Actually, if you change test.html to index.html, your URL is

http://staff.uiuc.edu/~j-levin/

(ie. it defaults to index.html)(and of course, j-levin is replaced by your own account name)

For students, the URL is

http://www.students.uiuc.edu/~your-username/