Creating a directory for your web page

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Creating a Directory for Your Web Page

These instructions for setting up your web directory assume you are working from a UNIX command prompt. You can get a command prompt either through telnet or opening a terminal window.

Make a sub-directory off of your home directory called WWW. You must use this name exactly and it must be 3 capital W's or the webserver will not be able to find your web pages.

mkdir WWW

The WWW directory must be world executable. By default the permissions of the directory are 775, so normally no further action is needed. In the event that the permissions of this directory have been changed, you will need to set them using the command: chmod o+x WWW. In other words, your webpage would still be viewable if you set the permissions to be 001. However, you will probably want to modify your webpage at some point so a bare minimum would be 601.

The next thing you will want to do is create a file called index.html. Make sure this file is world readable so that the webserver will be able to display it (otherwise you will get the famous 404 file not found error). Here is a way to create a very simple test page for now:

cd WWW echo "<HTML>This is a test page.</HTML>" > index.html

What is so special about a file called index.html? A file of this name is used loaded by the server when someone speicifies only your user directory and not any specific file, for example:

www.ele.uri.edu/~username/

is the same as:

www.ele.uri.edu/~username/index.html

Now you can try to view your web-page in a web browser by typing in the address above. If you get a permission denied error 403 or something similar, then the permissions on the file index.html may be set incorrectly. You can fix this by switching to the WWW directory and running:

chmod o+r index.html

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Page last updated: Monday, July 24, 2000