About pages.iu.edu

About Pages individual home page accounts

UITS provides the Pages web hosting service for serving individual web pages. Current IU faculty, staff, and students are eligible to create Pages accounts using the instructions in Get additional IU computing accounts. Your Pages account should be created (though inactive) within two hours after you request it. You should receive an email message directing you to accept the terms of service. If you do not receive an email, see the Pages Service Agreement. Upon acceptance, your account should then be active and available within another two hours. Each Pages account is allotted 1 GB of storage space.

Pages websites are intended for use by individuals needing to serve professional, research, instructional, or academic content. Each Pages account is assigned to an individual IU username and must be maintained by the account owner. Do not use Pages to share hobbies, family information, favorite links, or other personal content that is unrelated to your professional, research, or academic work.

Create your individual home page

The hostname for the Pages server is ssh-pages.iu.edu. It is configured as follows:

• Operating system: Ubuntu
• Web server software: Apache 2.4
• Default shell: /bin/bash

For web content to display properly, you must store it on ssh-pages.iu.edu in your ~/web directory (and/or its subdirectories).

Your home page will have the following URL (replace username with your IU username):

https://username.pages.iu.edu

Choose a method for creating and editing HTML files

You have the following options for creating and editing your Pages web content:

• Use an SSH2 client to connect to ssh-pages.iu.edu (log in with your IU username and passphrase, and then confirm your identity with Two-Step Login (Duo)). Then, use one of the installed text editors (Nano, vi, or Emacs) to create and edit HTML files in your ~/web directory.
• Use a text editor or word processor on your computer to create and edit HTML files, and then use an SFTP client to upload them to your ~/web directory on ssh-pages.iu.edu (see Upload your files below).
  Note:

  If you use a word processing program, make sure to save the file you create as a plain text file (or as HTML text, if that option is available) rather than the default word processing file format.
• Use an application specifically designed for creating and editing web pages, such as Adobe Dreamweaver, and then use an SFTP client to upload them to your ~/web directory on ssh-pages.iu.edu (see Upload your files below).
  Note:

  You can use your web design application to upload files directly to ssh-pages.iu.edu only if the application supports secure file transfer. For help, consult your application's documentation.

Name your home page

For your home page to display properly, you must name it home.html or index.html. If you do not use either of these file names, your home page URL (https://username.pages.iu.edu, where username is your IU username) will return an error.

Manage your files on Pages

Upload your files

Once you've created your web pages, you need to make sure they're in the proper place in your Pages account:

• If you used a text editor on ssh-pages.iu.edu from within your ~/web directory, your files are already in the right place.
• If you created your web page on your personal computer or on an STC workstation, you will need to upload the file to ssh-pages.iu.edu using an SFTP client.

Work with files and directories from the command line

To work with your Pages files and directories from the command line on ssh-pages.iu.edu, use an SSH2 client (for example, PuTTY in Windows or the Terminal in macOS) to open a terminal session on ssh-pages.iu.edu. When connecting via SSH, use the hostname ssh-pages.iu.edu, and your IU username and passphrase.

Because Pages runs on Ubuntu, you should be familiar with some basic Linux commands. In particular, note the following commonly used commands:

• Change directories: When you SSH to ssh-pages.iu.edu, you most likely will land in your home directory (~/). Use the cd command to navigate between directories:
  • To change from your home directory to your ~/web directory (where your Pages files are stored), on the command line, enter cd web.
  • To change from your ~/web directory to one of its subdirectories (if one exists), enter cd my_directory (replace my_directory with the name of your subdirectory).
  • To move back one level, from your subdirectory, to your ~/web directory, enter cd ...
  • To return to your home directory (~/) from any directory or subdirectory, enter cd.
• List files: Use the ls command to view the contents of a directory:
  • To list non-system files and directories stored in the current directory, on the command line, enter ls.
  • To include system/configuration files (dot files) in the list, enter ls -a.
  • To list all files and directories (including hidden dot files), and their associated metadata, enter ls -al.
  • To list non-system files and directories (and their associated metadata) sorted by modification time (newest first), enter ls -lt.
• Create a new directory: To create a new directory within the current directory, on the command line, enter mkdir my_directory (replace my_directory with the name of your subdirectory).
• Set file permissions: The correct file permissions should be set by default so that your pages will be visible to you and to others in a web browser.

  Use the chmod command to set file permissions:

  • To set file permissions an HTML file in your current directory, so that its accessible to anyone with the URL, on the command line, enter chmod 755 my_file.html (replace my_file.html with the name of your file).
  • To set file permissions on all files and subdirectories in your ~/web directory, so they are accessible to anyone with the appropriate URLs, enter cd to make sure you're in your home directory, and then enter chmod -R 755 ~/web.
  Note:

  You also can limit access so that only specific IU individuals can view your pages; see Limit access to your files below.

For more, see Introduction to Unix commands.

View your web pages

Once your files are in place and the permissions are set correctly, you can view your web pages in a browser:

• To view your home page (the home.html file in your ~/web directory), use the following URL (replace username with your IU username):

  https://username.pages.iu.edu/

• To view another web page stored in the top level of your ~/web directory, add the file name to the end of the URL; for example (replace username with your IU username and my_file.html with the name of your file):

  https://username.pages.iu.edu/my_file.html

• To view a web page stored in a subdirectory of your ~/web directory, the URL will include the name of that directory; for example (replace username with your IU username, my_subdirectory with the name of the subdirectory, and my_file.html with the name of your file):

  https://username.pages.iu.edu/my_subdirectory/my_file.html

Limit access to your files

To limit access to your web pages so that only specific IU individuals can view them, use .htaccess files in your ~/web directory and its subdirectories. For more, see Control web page access for Pages.

Publicize your individual home page

You have the following options for publicizing your individual home page:

• Create an email signature file that contains the URL for your home page. The signature file will be automatically appended to every email message you send.
• You may submit your web page's URL to a search engine such as Yahoo! or WebCrawler, but note that some search engines use robots to verify the address. By default, all Pages accounts have a robots.txt file in the ~/web directory that denies access to search crawlers. You can edit that file to allow certain search engines to index your website, or you can remove the file entirely to allow all indexing. For more about the robots.txt file, see Introduction to robots.txt.

Archive and transfer your site

You may want to save your website or some files in your account for your instructor's use, for your own use after you leave IU, or as an additional means of backup. You can use the Unix tar command to save entire directories or collections of files in one archive file that you can send to your personal computer or an STC workstation. You can also use the tar command to compress your archive to a smaller size, making it quicker to transfer. From your personal computer or an STC workstation, you can use Secure Share to share that file with someone such as your instructor.

Pages mail

Accounts have sendmail disabled by default and will not be able to send mail generated from the server, including from user-created scripts, web forms, and cron jobs running on the server. To request access to send email from Pages, account owners must submit a request from the WebTech website.