How to get a personal or group homepage

So you want your personal home page at https://people.phys.ethz.ch/~your_user_name/ or https://share.phys.ethz.ch/~your_group_name?

Note: ${HOME} refers to your home directory on the D-PHYS servers. 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.

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 directory (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/~your_user_name/

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/your_user_name/ with your_user_name 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 favourite web browser to http://people.phys.ethz.ch/~your_user_name/. (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 http://passwort.ethz.ch, log in with your N-ETHZ accouent, then navigate to my services and Homepage.

Making a homepage subdirectory password-protected

See How to restrict access to a personal homepage.

Show beautyful math on your page

Check out KaTeX.

FAQ

What happened to http://www.phys.ethz.ch/~my_user_name/?

The main website of the Department of Physics moved to a different, ETH-wide CMS.

This system doesn't have a personal homepage feature - hence it became necessary to move the D-PHYS personal homepages to a host name different from www.phys.ethz.ch. We've chosen people.phys.ethz.ch for that.

Will my old homepage addresses continue to work?

Yes.

The redirects which are already in effect will continue to exist after the move to the new hosting.