Publishing Web Pages

To publish web pages using Roxen WebServer there are a few things the web page creator ought to know. This chapter will explain the basics.

Roxen WebServer

To publish an HTML page through Roxen WebServer, the web page creator only needs to know in what directory the files should be placed and on what URL the pages will be found. This is configured by the administrator of the server.

The site must have a file system module enabled. The file system module can mount a directory from a normal file system as a virtual file system. When referring to other files, the path to the file must be in the virtual file system. Both absolute and relative paths can be used. An absolute path is static and begins at the root-level of the file system or mounted directory. A relative path however is dynamic and relative to the page from where the path is linked.

Our file's path: /home/eric/html/my_site/travel/Greece/animals.html

Absolute path to link an image from animals.html:
<img src="/home/eric/html/my_site/img/grasshopper.jpg" />

Relative path to link an image from animals.html:
<img src="../../img/grasshopper.jpg" />

Relative path to link a "facts" page from animals.html:
<a href="../../animals/insects/grasshoppers.html">More about grasshoppers</a>

As in the example, a website might have a dedicated directory for images in the site's root-directory (/home/eric/html/my_site/). This dedicated directory becomes a place where all images for the site might be stored and is easily accessed from the whole site. Using relative links to these images and other documents on the site makes it possible to move the entire site elsewhere without disrupting the links on the site.

To display the contents of a directory, a directory parsing module is needed. If a file called index.html is found in a directory that is mounted by a file system module, it will be shown when pointing a browser to the URL of that directory. By default the server will look for the following files: index.html, index.xml, index.htm, index.pike and index.cgi, in that order. The names and the order can be configured by the administrator.