All local users may use our web server to publish pages. The directory “www” in your home directory corresponds to the URL:
http://www.eecs.yorku.ca/~name/
… where name is your login name. Any file you place in this directory is accessible from this URL. For example if you create a file called “~name/www/info.html”, it would be accessible from the following URL:
http://www.eecs.yorku.ca/~name/info.html
The www.eecs.yorku.ca web server runs as a user “www”. This user has no special system privileges. In order to allow the web server to display your file, you must allow it to access your home directory, your “www” directory, and your file.
For the web server to be able to access your www directory, both your home directory, and your “www” directory must have the “execute” bit set for “other”. Set the execute bit on your home and www directories like this:
% chmod o+x ~name ~name/www
The “execute” bit may already be set for your home directory and your www directory. You can use the ls command to check. For example:
% ls -ld ~name drwxr-x--x. 9 user user 4096 Dec 22 23:18 /home/user
Here you can see that the permission for “other” (the third set of permissions) is “–x”. The execute bit is set on this directory, and hence the web server has access to it.
The web server must also be able to read your file:
% chmod o+r ~name/www/info.html
If you are using CGI scripts you will also need to set permissions appropriately. See the CGI script documentation for more information on this.