Managing your personal webspace

Your Webspace

Web pages use HTML, a markup language for formatting and style purposes.  If you're new to HTML, you'll probably want to find a good introduction or tutorial online.  The University of Waterloo has access to LinkedIn Learning and there are many good courses available there.

All members of the Faculty of Mathematics have access to their own personal webspace on www.math.uwaterloo.ca (for staff, faculty, graduate students and postdocs) and on www.student.math.uwaterloo.ca (for undergraduate students).  The pages you create are stored on the Faculty of Math's file servers, which you can access in multiple ways:

If you use the shared drive or the mapped network drives, you will likely run into permissions problems.  See the Common Problems section below.

Creating and Viewing Content

  • Create a folder called public_html (all lower case) and store all web content there.
  • You should generally create an index.html file for your public_html folder or any folder underneath.
    • Without an index page, that folder (or any subfolder you browse to) will just present a list of all the files the folder contains.
    • Types of pages other than .html pages will also work. Some examples are mentioned in the Advanced Content section below.
  • You can view your personal website at:
    • https://www.math.uwaterloo.ca/~<UWuserid>/ (for staff, faculty, graduate students and postdocs)
    • https://www.student.math.uwaterloo.ca/~<UWuserid>/ (for undergraduates)
    • Any file or subfolder you put in your public_html folder can be viewed by appending the path to the end of the URLs above.

Common Problems

When trying to view your web pages, you may get a 403/Forbidden error. This is typically due to incorrect permissions.

If you're using a mapped network drive from your personal machine (i.e. not joined to the NEXUS domain) you cannot properly set the permissions.  Use the Windows terminal servers or the Linux servers to set the permissions.

Most sftp clients have a means to set permissions built in, or you can reset them from the Linux servers, using chmod:

  • Your files under your public_html folder should be set to be readable by all: 
    • find ~/public_html -type f -exec chmod a+r \{\} \;

  • Additionally, the public_html folder and any folders under it should be both readable and listable (executable) by all:

    • find ~/public_html -type d -exec chmod a+rx \{\} \;

Advanced Content

The Math web servers support multiple types of server-side processing, and is configured to process files with extensions .shtml, .cgi, .php among others.  Note that for most of these types of web content, the files will need to have extra file permissions enabled, the execute permissions for the user in particular.

Your personal webspace's configuration can be tuned by using .htaccess files in your directory structure.  You should be very careful with this, but there is a very technical tutorial on the Apache Project website.