How to Setup Your Home Page (Personal Webpage)

Overview

The University of Texas at Dallas hosts user managed webpages on the personal.utdallas.edu subdomain. All active students, faculty, and staff can create personal webpages that will be hosted at https://personal.utdallas.edu/~NetID. Personal webpages may also be accessed using the preferred email address (PEA) prefix, such as https://personal.utdallas.edu/~john.doe.

Follow the instructions below to setup and begin configuration of your personal webpage.

Procedure

1. SSH to giant.utdallas.edu.
2. In the root of your home directory, enter the command makeweb.
3. Copy (or create) an index.html file to the newly created directory.
4. Use chmod 644 index.html to allow global read access to the file.
   • This is required for the web server to serve the contents of your website.
5. Additional pages, images, attachments may be added to the site by repeating the steps 3-4.

Example File Structure

Additional sub-directories may be created within the public_html top level site directory. Each sub directory must have global r+x (read & execute) permissions. All files to be served, regardless of directory, must have global read permissions. An example file structure is listed below, along with the permissions required.

~/public_html $ tree
.
|-- assets
|   |-- index.css
|   `-- index.js
|-- icon.svg
|-- index.html
`-- pages
    |-- about.html
    `-- projects.html

~/public_html $ ls -l
drwx---r-x. 2 abc123456 ts   71 Feb  7 13:46 assets
drwx---r-x. 2 abc123456 ts   59 Feb  7 13:46 pages
-rw-r--r--. 1 abc123456 ts  493 Feb  7 13:47 index.html
-rw-r--r--. 1 abc123456 ts 1497 Feb  7 13:46 icon.svg

Advanced Topics & Troubleshooting

• Troubleshooting Permissions Issues
• CGI Use on Personal Webpages
• Password Protecting a Page/Folder