Home page directory

The standard name for the root of the directory in which a user's web pages are located is public_html, located in the user's top directory. The top directory (/home/joeuser in this example) is the working directory where you find yourself when you first log in. It is also possible to go to this directory by giving the cd command with no arguments. Assuming you are in your home directory, you can give the commands:

  ~/> mkdir public_html
  ~/> chmod go=rx public_html
  ~/> ls -ld public_html
  drwxr-xr-x    2 joeuser   students      1024 Sep  4 17:25 public_html

The ls command verifies that the directory has been set up with world read and access permission, so that the web server can access its contents.² (The d in front of the permissions in the directory listing indicates that public_html is a directory. For an ordinary file it is a minus sign, and for symbolic links it is an l.)

Now you can create an index.html file and place it in this directory. Then giving the URL http://somehost.fordham.edu/~joeuser to a web browser will present this file as the entry point into your web site.

Note: the term ``URL space'' refers to all the directories on a server that can be accessed by URLs (Uniform Resource Locators), otherwise called HTML references, in web pages. For individual users, URL space is confined to files and subdirectories of the public_html directory. Any sensitive files that should not be available to the world should be located outside this directory. Such files include world-writable files used by CGI programs like hit counters and guest-books, as well as password files for areas controlled by the .htaccess mechanism.