Web Publishing Basics

From XMission Wiki

Jump to: navigation, search

Contents

Your Web Space

XMission provides you with several GB of space in your home directory depending on your account type. This storage is located on XMission's file system in 

/home/users/u/username
where u is the first letter of your account name and username is your XMission username.

In that directory you'll notice two other directories already created. One is ftp and the other is public_html. All web pages and files you want viewable by the web need to go in public_html.

In your public_html directory, there are three files. One of those files is named index.html. XMission's webservers are configured to use index.html as the default web page in any web directory. Anything you put in that place, as long as it's named index.html, will come up automatically when someone goes to your URL.

URL's/Web Addresses

A standard XMission account, that includes web space, will have a default URL of 

http://www.xmission.com/~username
where username is your XMission username
.

If you've never published pages to XMission before, you can see the default index.html at that address.

If you have a Hosting account with XMission, the default setup is the same. You can access your pages by going to your domain name, 
http://www.mydomain.com
, or by going to either of the addresses shown above. Think of your domain address as a nickname for your default XMission address.

File Locations vs. URL's

To help clarify the difference between the location of a file on the file system and the web address of that file, see the following example.

My account name is foo. I have a web page that I've named mypage.html. To make this file accessible by the web, I put the file in my public_html directory.

The file system location of mypage.html is: 

/home/users/f/foo/public_html/mypage.html

-or- 

~foo/public_html/mypage.html

The web address, or URL, of mypage.html is: 

http://www.xmission.com/~foo/mypage.html

Setting Permissions

Anything in your public_html directory that you'd like to be web accessible should be readable by all. You can do this by issuing the command chmod a+r filename in your telnet shell or in some FTP programs. If you would like to remove read access to a file, issue the command chmod go-r filename. This also works with directories. Make sure not to change permissions on your public_html directory or you may risk having all of your web pages inaccessible.

Note: You may set all public_html permissions to defaults by logging in to http://home.xmission.com/ and selecting the My Account tab. There, you will find a Repair Your Web Permissions option under the XMission Tools section.

Limiting Access

There are other ways to limit access besides setting permissions. One way is setting a file called .htaccess in the directory you want to limit access to. There are many rules you can set, including limiting access by IP address or domain. It's most widely used, though, for adding password protection. If you're interested in setting up a .htaccess file to add password protection to one of your directories, refer to our htaccess help page.

Common Mistakes and Problems

  • Images were transferred from a DOS/Mac machine in text mode rather than binary mode
  • Your file is a MS-DOS text file and not a UNIX text file
  • Including public_html in a document's URL
  • Attempting to reference a file that isn't in your public_html directory
  • File or directory permissions that prohibit the server from reading the documents
  • Permissions changed on public_html, resetting group ownership
  • Case discrepancies with filenames (e.g., Index.html instead of index.html)
  • viewing a cached copy of the page (Shift+Reload or Ctrl+Refresh to view updated documents)
Retrieved from "http://wiki.xmission.com/index.php/Web_Publishing_Basics"
Personal tools