Setting up a home page on www.cs.unc.edu

Last Reviewed 2023-01-23

Note: CS accounts created on or after 01/01/2023 will need to use our NFS web storage, as our AFS storage is being retired. 

Users in the Department of Computer Science can create a personal home page on the web using either AFS or NFS storage space.

NFS Web Hosting

Login to a CS Linux system at the console and create a sub-directory named public_html in your NFS home directory, (you must use this name exactly). If you are remote, you can also SSH to the Linux system login.cs.unc.edu. Execute the following commands to create your public_html directory and give the proper permissions so the web server can read your files:

cd /common/home/<user name>
mkdir public_html
chgrp www-data public_html

In your public_html sub-directory, using your favorite text editor or an HTML editor, create a file called index.html. (you must use this name exactly.) This file may contain whatever you want to place on the web, and it must use HTML (hypertext markup language) to specify formatting or links to other pages.

Your public_html page will map to the following URL: https://www.cs.unc.edu/~login_name, where login_name is the name of your login account.  See the Department’s Web Server FAQ for more information.

AFS Web Hosting

Login to a CS Linux system at the console and create a sub-directory named public_html in your AFS home directory, (you must use this name exactly). If you are remote, you can also SSH to the Linux system login.cs.unc.edu. Execute the following commands to create your public_html directory and give the proper AFS permissions so the web server can read your files:

cd /afs/cs.unc.edu/home/<user name>
fs setacl . system:anyuser l
mkdir public_html
fs setacl public_html web-server rl

In your public_html sub-directory, using your favorite text editor or an HTML editor, create a file called index.html. (you must use this name exactly.) This file may contain whatever you want to place on the web, and it must use HTML (hypertext markup language) to specify formatting or links to other pages.

Your public_html page will map to the following URL: https://www.cs.unc.edu/~login_name, where login_name is the name of your login account.  See the Department’s Web Server FAQ for more information.

Other Hosting Options

Alternatively you can use the campus https://tarheels.live/ service to maintain a web site using WordPress. You would choose an available name for your site like login_name.web.unc.edu. You could then put a .htaccess file in your Computer Science account space at /home/login_name/public_html/.htaccess that does a redirect to login_name.web.unc.edu. The .htaccess would look something like this:

RedirectMatch ^/~login_name/index.html http://login_name.web.unc.edu/