How to set up a Home Page

Alias for WWW server

Two WWW aliases has been created for Sunburn: www-cs-staff and www-cs-faculty.

Do you want to make your own HTML documents?

Do you know HTML?

How do I set up my account to serve my own documents?

Each user may serve documents from a personal public_html directory which contains the documents that they wish to make available on the web.

Note that public_html directory and all the documents in it must be world readable.

The cookbook steps you need to complete are:

Create the public_html directory

mkdir ~/public_html
note the underscore

Make the public_html directory accessible to the world

chmod a+rx ~/public_html

Create a simple homepage

Copy the standard home page from the WWW user:

     cp ~www/templates/index.html ~/public_html/

There are a few other templates in the same directory as well. Don't forget to edit the files after copying (unless you like being known as Joe Random) and make sure that the files are readable by everyone.

If you are really interested, the gory details of how documents are served through the web is summarised for you.

When the server receives a request for a document from ~foo, it converts this into a reference to the user foo's public_html directory, which is located in foo's home directory.

In other words, the URL http://sunburn.stanford.edu/~foo/bar/twiddle.html means the web path ~foo/bar/twiddle.html on the Sunburn machine. The web user ~foo is mapped onto the users public html directory: /u/foo/public_html/, and the document is retrieved from there, making the path to the document that is retrieved: /u/foo/public_html/bar/twiddle.html.

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