In order to publish your website, you must put all files that are part of your website (including
any pictures, videos, etc.) in a folder named public_html, that is located
in your home directory.
When you login to a remote machine using secure shell, the directory you start in is probably
your home directory. If you want to be certain that you are in your home directory, type:
cd ~
The squiggly symbol is called a tilde (pronounced tilled-uh) and
is a symbolic abbreviation for your home directory. It is located in the upper left of a
QWERTY keyboard, immediately to the left of the one (1) key and immediately above the Tab key.
The abbreviation of using the tilde (~) symbol to represent a user's home directory is a
universal abbreviation used by all Unix and Unix-based systems.
You can also use the tilde to move to any user's home directory
by prefixing the user's name with the tilde. For example, if I were logged in under a user name
other than rosentha and I typed
cd ~rosentha
that would take me to the home directory
of the user named rosentha (which happens to be me), which is located at
/u/users/gen2005/Jun/class/rosentha. If I were logged in under rosentha, all
I would have to type to take me to the same directory is
cd ~
Once you are in your home directory, you need to create a directory named
public_html, unless it already exists. To check if it already exists,
type the command ls -al to list all files and subdirectories in the
current directory. ls stands for "list", the
-a option stands for "all" and it causes the list to include all
files and subdirectories in the directory as opposed to the default of only listing the files and
subdirectories not starting with a period (a file with a name like
".tcshrc" is excluded from the list if the
-a option is not used because it starts with a period), and the
-l option stands for "long" and puts extra information in the list
like who the file belongs to, the date of last modification of the file, etc.
The output should be similar to this:
[rosentha@ww2 ~]$ ls -al
total 44
drwxr-xr-x 4 rosentha maj 4096 Mar 19 01:46 .
drwxr-xr-x 279 root root 8192 Mar 14 10:02 ..
-rwx------ 1 rosentha maj 298 Mar 22 18:25 .alias
-rw------- 1 rosentha maj 24 Mar 13 22:20 .aspell.en.prepl
-rw------- 1 rosentha maj 21 Mar 13 22:20 .aspell.en.pws
-rw------- 1 rosentha maj 42 Mar 14 03:31 .bash_history
drwxr-xr-x 15 rosentha maj 4096 Mar 25 04:40 public_html
drwx------ 2 rosentha maj 4096 Mar 3 09:21 .ssh
-rwx------ 1 rosentha maj 91 Mar 17 04:50 .tcshrc
-rw------- 1 rosentha maj 60 Mar 14 17:59 .Xauthority
The output on your computer might be slightly different than what you see above, but the format should be
similar. As you can see from the 9th row of output above (which is highlighted in yellow), I already have
a directory named public_html in my home directory, but if I didn't, I could
create one using the command
mkdir public_html
mkdir is short for
"make directory", and it makes a directory with the
given name (in this case public_html) unless it already exists.
