How to edit your HTML homepage

Your public_html directory is the place to store HTML (i.e. web pages) and associated files you'd like to make publicly available on the World Wide Web. Your tilde.town account includes a default place-holder web page -- it can be visited using a web browser:

https://tilde.town/~YOUR_USER_NAME/index.html

That index.html file is actually located in your public_html directory.

To edit it, log in to your tilde.town account using ssh and open the file in a text editor -- for example, nano:

$ nano ~/public_html/index.html

In nano, editing commands are listed at the bottom of the screen. When you see a ^ character, that indicates the Ctrl key. So, for example, ^O Write Out means press Ctrl-O to save your work, and ^X Exit means press Ctrl-X to exit. (Help with other editors.)

You're not limited to a single HTML file in your public_html directory: you can add more web pages, along with stylesheets, images, subdirectories, etc. But index.html is the page people will see by default if they visit https://tilde.town/~YOUR_USER_NAME/ without specifying any other file.

If you have a file in your public_html directory that can't be accessed via a web browser, chances are it's a file permission problem. Using the chmod command to make the file readable to anyone will likely fix it:

$ chmod u=rw,g=r,o=r ~/public_html/FILENAME

As well as editing files over ssh, you can upload and download files using a related tool called sftp (...which you run at your end, as with ssh). For the manual, type man sftp and see especially the Description and Interactive Commands sections. Some of the most useful sftp commands are:

help Show a list of sftp commands ls [PATH] Show a directory listing from the remote computer lls [PATH] Show a directory listing from the local computer cd PATH Change the current remote directory to PATH lcd PATH Change the current local directory to PATH put FILE Copy FILE from the local computer to the remote computer get FILE Copy FILE from the remote computer to the local computer mput FILES Copy multiple files from the local computer to the remote computer For example, to upload all JPG files: mput *.jpg mget FILES Copy multiple files from the remote computer to the local computer For example, to download all HTML files: mget *.html rename OLD NEW Rename OLD as NEW on the remote computer mkdir PATH Create the named directory on the remote computer rmdir PATH Delete the named directory on the remote computer rm FILE Delete the named file on the remote computer pwd Show the current working directory on the remote computer lpwd Show the current working directory on the local computer bye Quit sftp

Some useful resources:

• Learn HTML
• Learn CSS
• A unix-y templating command for generating static pages

last compiled: 2021-06-04 12:34:03.178788