Tufts EECS Systems Information

Personal Web Space

Every Student/Faculty/Staff member with an EECS account also has access to their own personal web space. Cool, huh?
You may utilize this web space as long as you continue to manage your password. See Also: Your Account After Graduation

How It Works
  • In your home directory you need to make a folder titled public_html.
  • This folder will be openly accessible at:

http://www.cs.tufts.edu/~[username] -or- http://www.ee.tufts.edu/~[username].

  • You will set the correct permissions on your “home directory” and the “public_html” directories.
  • This can be accomplished by executing the following commands : 
    > cd ~
> mkdir public_html
> chmod 755 public_html
> chmod 711 ~
  • Simply place the files which you would like to have users see in this folder (An index.html page is required).
  • Without this file, visitors to your web site will see a listing of the files you have in your “public_html” directory.
  • As you create new files and directories, you must verify that they have the proper permissions set.
  • The proper setting for files is 644, and directories is 755.
    • You can set these by executing : 
      > chmod 755 
> chmod 644

Securing Your Web Space

Securing Web Directories

How to Secure Your Web Directories with .htaccess Files

You may restrict access to web-accessible files and directories using the “.htaccess” files. This allows you to:

  • Establish a list of persons you want to authorise (you decide by using their login_name)
  • Associate a list of passwords. (It can be any password. There is no connection at all with the UNIX accounts.)
  • You will have complete control over both these items. (It also means that you will have to take the time to manage them.)


Example of “.htaccess” :

AuthUserFile /directory/directory/directory/.htpasswd
AuthType Basic
AuthName "Access This"

        require valid-user

In order to create a password file, use the command “htpasswd”.

> htpasswd -c .htpasswd user_name
New password:
Re-type new password:
Adding password for user user_name
>

Exemple of “.htpasswd” :

user_name:ubA1Fa9QN.9Fs

Both .htaccess and .htpasswd must be readable by the web server, which generally means they must be world readable.

> chmod 644 .ht*
>