Creating Access for the Web on ocelot

Checking the access rights to your home directory

In order to set up your directory for web publishing, you must have the correct access rights of your home directory so that everyone can execute files stored in it. To check your access rights, issue the following command from your home directory

ls -ldH ~ 

Note: The above command uses the letter "l",not the number "1". 

You should see output similar to the following

drwx--x--x     dlett007

	or

drwx--S--x     dlett007

        or

drwx-----x     dlett007

Note: dlett007 will be replaced by your ocelot user name

It is the final "x" that is important in the string "drwx--x--x". If you do not have the final "x", then you must change the access rights for your home directory. If you have the final "x", then you may skip the next paragraph, and continue with Creating your Web directory.

Changing the access rights to your home directory

This does not change the default permissions when you create a file. In order to allow someone to execute or read a file, you will still need to change the access rights manually for that file. This command only needs to be executed once.

• If you are not logged on, then log onto ocelot
• Issue the following command

  chmod  701  ~
  
  

Creating your Web directory

Once you have set up the permissions for your home directory, then it is time to set up permissions for your web directory. Here at FIU, your web directory must be named public_html

• Issue the command
  mkdir public_html
• Issue the command
  chmod 705 public_html
• Issue the command
  cd public_html
• Use the nano, vi or emacs editor to create an index.html page. Close the editor when you are done.
• Issue the command
  chmod 604 index.html
  This will fix the access rights of your home page so that you can edit the file. You only need to execute this command once per file.

This has done three things

1. Created a directory called public_html in your ocelot account. The complete path to this directory would be ~dlett007/public_html, replacing dlett007 with your ocelot username.
2. Created a file in the public_html directory named index.html This file is where the HTML code for your home page is located.
3. Created a URL for you at the school. The URL would be http://www.aul.fiu.edu/~dlett007, replacing dlett007 with your ocelot username.

How to edit your index.html file and view it in a browser simultaneously

It is possible to ssh to a school computer to edit index.html and to run a browser to view how your page looks.

• Connect to the computer ocelot.
• Issue the commands:
  • cd public_html
  • nano index.html
• Now you are in the nano editor, looking at your home page file, index.html
• Minimize the ssh application.
• Start the browser and access your URL, http://www.aul.fiu.edu/~dlett007, replacing dlett007 with your ocelot username.
• Now by using the ALT-TAB key combination (CMD-TAB on Macs), you will be able to switch back and forth between the browser and the ssh to ocelot. Make and save changes in ocelot, then reload the page in the browser.