Linux Web Hosting

Hosting Web Pages

Our primary Linux system are configured to serve web pages to the world. You can get it to serve your own web pages if you set them up properly. The following outline gives you the highlights of what you have to do.

Setting up your web space

Make a directory named public_html right under your home directory.
The following command should make the required directory for you.
```
mkdir $HOME/public_html
                        
```
The web browser is configured to look in a public_html directory for each user account. This way, each user can serve their own html files without having to put them in some other place in the filesystem. Since all of our Linux machines share the same filesystem, you can build your web pages on any of our Linux hosts and the primary host will still serve them.
Adjust security permissions
As long you don't want any other files or directories in your home directory to be world readable, the following commands should set permissions appropriately.
```
  	  chmod 700 $HOME/*
                          chmod 755 $HOME
                          chmod 755 $HOME/public_html
                        
```
The first line makes it so that files and directories inside your home directory can't be ready by anyone other than yourself. This is probably a good idea since you don't want other students to look at things like copies of your homework assignments.
The second line makes your home directory itself readable by everyone. The last line does the same thing for your public_html directory. This is necessary because the web server does not run with any special permissions. If regular users can't read your web pages, then the web server won't be able to read them either.
Put the web pages you want in your public_html directory.
You can also use you favorite SFTP client to copy files from your local system to the server or you can edit your web pages with a regular text editor like vi or emacs. You can even make subdirectories under public_html to organize your website in a way that makes sense.
Although we don't enforce any absolute restrictions on the amount of disk space you can use for web pages, we ask that you don't abuse this resource. If you take too much space, we may have to ask you to get rid of some things.
Visit these pages on the web at http://cs.ecs.baylor.edu/~your_login_name.
If you put a file named index.html in a directory, the server will use this file as the default when a browser visits that file's directory. A common trick is to make $HOME/public_html/index.html a symbolic link to your home page (say, $HOME/public_html/home.html), then users will get your home page whenever they visit http://cs.ecs.baylor.edu/~your_login_name.

Common Questions

Are there other web servers I can use?
Yes. Baylor offers students access to the blogs.baylor.edu web server. Additional details on this offering can be found at helpdeskplus.web.baylor.edu/wordpress
Can I run CGI scripts on our Linux host?
Unfortunately, we are not able to let students run CGI scripts from our Linux systems.