Personal or group homepage¶

This guide is valid for personal homepages served from your home directory or for group homepages served from groupshares. The latter can be a good way to share large amounts of group data with selected people or the public.

The homepages are available under the following URLs:

• https://people.phys.ethz.ch/~username/ (Home directory)
• https://share.phys.ethz.ch/~groupname/ (Groupshare)

Note: This guide uses the shell variable ${HOME}, which will be evaluated by your shell and replaced with your home directory (example: /home/username). This is automatically available on the managed workstations (either ${HOME} on Linux and macOS, or the H: drive on Windows). For self managed workstations read how to access the fileservers.

Note for group homepages: Simply replace ${HOME} with /home/groupname

Access from any computer¶

You can log in from any computer to our login server (login.phys.ethz.ch) using SSH and from there create the homepage in your home/groupshare (see below).

Creating the homepage¶

Here's how to setup your homepage:

Short description for Linux and Mac command line users¶

mkdir ${HOME}/public_html
chmod 755 ${HOME}/public_html
$EDITOR ${HOME}/public_html/index.html
$BROWSER https://people.phys.ethz.ch/~username/

General description (e.g. for Mac, Windows, KDE or GNOME users)¶

• Create a directory public_html in your home directory (this is the directory /home/username/ with username replaced by your user name. It is not your desktop neither the directory /home/)
• Make it at least world accessible. You home directory does not need to be world accessible or readable though.
• Create a file called index.html in that newly created directory and put some HTML in it. See http://de.selfhtml.org/ for a good, easy to understand and though comprehensive HTML documentation in German.
• Point your favorite web browser to https://people.phys.ethz.ch/~username/. (Please note that you will get a "Permission denied" error if you didn't create an index.html file beforehand.)
• You may optionally register your personal homepage to show up in the ETH phone book. Go to https://passwort.ethz.ch, log in with your ETH account, then navigate to my services and Homepage.

Subdirectory password protection¶

See How to restrict access to a personal homepage.

Show beautiful math on your page¶

Check out KaTeX.

Configuration options¶

For the default public_html configuration and the list of allowed configuration options via .htaccess files, please refer to personal homepage configuration.

FAQ¶

Can I use symbolic links?¶

Only relative symbolic links with source and target within public_html are supported. Links to targets residing outside of the public_html and furthermore, links to /net are not possible.

Can I use CGI scripts for dynamic content?¶

Not by default. Please contact us and request CGI execution for your preferred scripting language like PHP, Python, Perl, etc.