WPI students, faculty, and staff have the ability to create a website using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, hosted on the WPI server. This website space is called your "Userspace." Personal website can be viewed by navigating to http://users.wpi.edu/~username where username is your WPI username.

Content placed within a user's public_html directory can be served out by the WPI web server. Follow instructions below for accessing your userspace, adding content, and modifying the permissions to your site.

Departmental Sites & Faculty Profiles
Contact Marketing & Communications for creation/modifications.

Requirements

  • The file name of your website homepage must be named index.html
  • index.html must be located in your public_html folder
  • All websites must follow WPI's Acceptable Use Policy
  • Set the proper permissions on every file in your public_html directory

Setup Your public_html Directory

To get started, create your files and directories in your public_html folder by mapping:

  • Windows: \\stroage.wpi.edu\home\USERNAME\public_html
  • Mac OSX / Linux: smb://storage.wpi.edu/home/USERNAME/public_html

This is where you will keep all content you wish to display on your website. The content of your website's homepage must be in an HTML file called: index.html

Use a text editor (Notepad, TextEdit, etc.), or source code editor (VS Code, Atom, etc.), to create HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files to save within your directory. 

View Your Website

To preview content stored in your folder, you can navigate in a web browser to https://users.wpi.edu/users/~USERNAME (where USERNAME is your WPI username).

Modify Website Permissions

You may receive a permission denied error message when attempting to access your userspace, and that is okay! By default, the items in that folder are not made public in an effort to prevent any accidental sharing of the files.

In order to share those folders/files, you will need to changes the permissions. If you are familiar with Unix/Linux, you can set them to your preferred values, but if you are new to Linux, we have the following suggested commands. 

Connect to Linux Terminal Server
To run the commands, you must first connect to the Linux Terminal Server on your machine. 

Commands

In this command we are first finding the directory public html within your home directory (represented by the ~ character) and then setting their permissions using the chmod command:

find ~/public_html -type f -exec chmod 00604 {} \;
find ~/public_html -type d -exec chmod 00701 {} \;

For each CGI in your web tree, run the following command in the ssh client, where CGI_NAME is the name of the CGI executable file:

chmod 00701 cgi_name

where cgi_name is the name of the CGI executable file.