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Customizing your Website

Follow these steps to customize your website from the Linux terminal and learn more commands.

If you cannot yet see the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Test Page when you type in the following in a web browser, return to step 5,

http://<ip-address>

Again, make sure to type in 'http' not 'https', sometimes web browsers will automatically switch it to 'https'. If this happens, use Firefox.

Adding a Custom Homepage to your Website

  • So now you have a website running, but it's not really that interesting. It doesn't feel like it's yours yet.
  • Let's get rid of this default test page by adding a homepage of our own!
  • Website contents for httpd are stored in the directory /var/www/html.
  • You may recognize 'www' from URLs you've seen before on the internet, and 'html' refers to Hyper-Text Markup Language. You can read more about HTML here.
  • As the root user, or with sudo, use the touch command to create a file called index.html in the /var/www/html directory.
touch /var/www/html/index.html
  • If you return to your website, you'll notice that the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Test Page is no longer there. Great! But now we just have a boring white page.
  • Let's first change into the /var/www/html directory:
cd /var/www/html
  • Now use the vi command to open the 'visual' text editor and customize your newly created index.html file.
vi index.html
  • Which will open an empty page that looks like this:

~
~
~
  • To start editing, press the i key to enter 'insert' mode.
  • Now go wild! Fill your index.html file with text, headers, colors, images! Customize to your hearts content! Do whatever you want with your website! Refer to this HTML cheat sheet for a quick guide on getting the most out of your customization.
  • When you are done editing, hit the Esc key to exit 'insert' mode, then type :wq to 'write' (save) and 'quit'.
  • If you want to quit without saving, do the same as above, except :q!
  • To return editing your index file again, use the vi command again.
  • Pro Tip! You can use the Tab key to autocomplete path and file names. Try it out the nex time you're typing in a filename, i.e. vi in<tab> and it should autocomplete the filename index.html for you.

Creating Webpages

  • Now that we have a homepage squared away (I hope you got creative!), you can create other pages for your website too.
  • From the /var/www/html directory (pwd should return '/var/www/html'), create a sub-directory called page2 (or anything you like) using the mkdir (short for 'make directory'):
mkdir page2
  • Now create an index.html page for your new webpage:
touch page2/index.html
  • You could customize this page too, if you like, and then go to your http://<ip-address>/page2 and see that webpage.
  • Let's delete that for now though, using the rm (for 'remove') command.
rm page2/index.html

Which will prompt you:

rm: remove regular file 'page2/index.html'?
  • Hit the y key for 'yes' and then Enter to delete it.
  • You can use the -f option for 'force' to avoid having to answer this prompt in the future. Be careful though! There's no equivalent to the 'Recycle Bin' by default, so once you delete a file, it's gone.
  • You can also remove an empty directory using the rmdir command:
rmdir page2
  • You can also delete directories with the rm command with the -r for 'recursive' option. When ombined with the -f this can be a powerful, and very dangerous command, especially when run as root, so be careful!

Big Picture

Are you starting to see how the internet is formed?

  • It's all made up of servers exposing files to each other over publicly accessible networks. The files get fancier, with Javascript and CSS, but the concepts are the same.
  • And instead of using IP addresses to access those servers' files, we generally use names like www.ibm.com instead, right? These names are converted to IP addresses by DNS (or Domain Name System). You could purchase a domain name for your website so that people could more easily find and navigate to it!
  • Although since we only have http set up, and not https ("What's the difference?), people would get a security warning before they got to your website.
  • So although this is far from a full-fledged website, hopefully this helped you get a better picture of how the internet works, and you learned some Linux terminal skills along the way!

Review

You've made it a long way in this tutorial of the basics of the Linux terminal. You now have the beginnings of a website, and you've learned some more commands:

  • touch <file> to create a file
  • vi <file> to edit a file
  • mkdir <directory> to create a directory
  • rm <file> to delete a file
  • rmdir <directory> to delete a directory

Hands-On Lab Complete!

  • Nice work!! If you've made it this far, you're well on your well to becoming a Linux terminal pro!
  • I hope this tutorial was helpful and interesting for you.
  • If you would like to do another hands-on lab about Ansible on IBM zSystems, check it out here!
  • If you have comments, questions, feedback concerns, I'd love to hear them!
  • Please reach out to me at jacob.emery@ibm.com