Creating a Webpage

The Mathematics department hosts three separate web spaces:

• The official department website at https://www.mathematics.utoronto.ca which hosts the main home page plus other information such as people directories. This website can only changed by contacting the webmaster.
• Personal user webpages (static HTML only, no PHP) at URLs of the form https://www.math.utoronto.ca/<user>/ which this guide covers.
• Webpages which require coding (and possibly a database) with URLs of the form https://users.math.utoronto.ca/<site>/, which are available on a case-by-case basis by contacting requests@math.utoronto.ca.

In order for members of the department to obtain personal web space on the Math WWW server you must first send an email to requests@math.utoronto.ca. An account on the WWW server will be opened for you and a directory called www-data will be created inside your coxeter home directory (you will see a basic index.html webpage in there after running startwww, see below).

While the www-data directory is created on coxeter, your web files are actually stored on the web server and hence need to be made available for editing by running the command startwww (on coxeter). After running the command you will be asked to authenticate using your coxeter credentials (user name and password), at which point you will be able to access your web files within the www-data directory. Note that you will only need to run startwww once unless either coxeter or the web server are rebooted in which case you'll need to re-run the command. It does not hurt to run the command multiple times, and so it's recommended you simply run it whenever you need to edit your web files (if they are already available you will be informed and no password will be required). For more help about the command you can type:

startwww -h

at the coxeter prompt. Of note is the -o switch which sets the appropriate permissions of the files within www-data so they can be served via the web (i.e. startwww -o).

Once the web files are available the directory can be acessed by typing cd ~/www-data and edits can be made. Your web pages will be reachable at:

https://www.math.utoronto.ca/<user>/

where <user> is your coxeter user name. An introductory guide to editing HTML code can be found at https://www.w3schools.com.

Warning: If you have course webpages and/or you keep confidential items like exam files or course marks tables in www-data (or any subirectory therein) these files will become readable when you run startwww -o. Please be careful! Also, if you use .htaccess files to control access to your webpages then those files will become readable as well (the default on coxeter is to not give others access to your files). You can, however, open individual files and directories for access with chmod a+rX <filename>.

If you are updating your web pages remember that you usually need to use the Reload or Refresh button in your browser to see the changes or else you will get the old cached version of the pages which makes it look like the changes have not taken effect. You should also be able to copy files and directories inside the www-data directory to make them available via the web (just make sure that the permissions are correctly set, as explained above).

Note that if you use .htaccess files then you need to run chmod o-rwx .htusers on all your .htusers files if you ever open up all you files (you can ignore this if you don't use such files).

If you have any questions about web pages please contact webmaster@math.utoronto.ca.