Setting Up an ARCiB Web Page

Once you have an account in ARCiB.dowling.edu, and can connect to it, you will want to create web pages. Unlike the process of setting up a Google sites web page Mary Fran's Getting Started with Google Sites, instead of using a graphical user interface (GUI), all the setup for an ARCiB web site is done by typing commands in a terminal window.

The things you need to do are:

• Just once, create a directory (a folder) called public_html.
• Just once, create a directory (a folder) called public_html/cgi-bin.
• Each time you want to work on web pages, change directories to public_html.
• Each time you want to create a new page, pick a name for it, say mypage, add the extension .html and use an editor to create it.
• Each time you want to change the contents of a web page, just edit it again.
• Each to, you want to work on a Common Gateway Interface (CGI) program, change directories to public_html/cgi-bin and edit your CGI program (see Setting up Python CGI).
• To look at your web page, you use a browser and go to http://arcib.dowling.edu/~USERNAME/mypage.html

Creating a public_html directory

When you first log in to your account, you are in your home directory. Each user has a different home directory. Inside that home directory you have files as sub-directories. In order to support web pages you need to have a public_html sub-directory of your home directory. You can create it by

mkdir public_html

Creating a cgi-bin directory

Once you have created a public_html sub-directory of your home directory, you need to create a cgi-bin subdirectoty of the public_html directory. If you just created public_html then you can do

mkdir public_html/cgi-bin

or, if you have been doing other work and are not certain whether you are in your home directory or somewhere else, then, first return to your home directory by

cd

and then drop down to public_html by

cd public_html

and then create the cgi-bin subdirectory by

mkdir cgi-bin

Going to cgi-bin

If you have already created public_html/cgi-bin, you can reliably go to public_html/cgi-bin by first returning to your home directory and then dropping down to public_html/cgi-bin

cd
cd public_html/cgi-bin

Editing a web page

In order to create or change a web page, you need an editor. One of the simplest to use is called pico on arcib. On other machines, a similar editor is call nano. See

http://www.ncsu.edu/it/essentials/managing_files/text_editors/pico_tutor/

and

http://mintaka.sdsu.edu/reu/nano.html