How To Upload Web Pages to Square One

In Brief (for experienced users)

Square One uses Apache as its Web server. The root folder for Web documents is located at /hdd/3/htdocs/. FTP to 192.168.1.1 (or whatever Square One's local IP is, or its WAN IP address if you are connecting remotely) and log in as admin to copy files into this directory. You can make changes to Apache's configuration by editing the file at /hdd/1/apache/conf/httpd.conf.

Note: For compatibility purposes, Apache's directory can also be reached through the symbolic link /usr/local/apache/.

Introduction

So you've created some HTML files on your computer, and now you'd like to put them on Square One so that people on the Internet can see your Web site. Publishing Web documents on Square One is easy, once you know how.

First, you'll need a good FTP client. That's a program that you run on your computer and use to copy files to (and from) Square One using Square One's built-in FTP service. While it's true you could copy your HTML files to Square One through Windows networking (Windows Explorer), it's just more reliable to use an FTP client.

If you don't already have an FTP client that you know and love, there are many free ones available for download on the Internet. For Windows, one free client we especially like is SmartFTP. Another good choice is the open source client FileZilla.

Once you've downloaded and installed an FTP client, publishing your Web pages on Square One is a simple matter of copying them from your computer into a special folder on Square One.

Uploading your Web files to Square One

  1. Open your FTP client and connect to 192.168.1.1 (or whatever you've set Square One's local IP address to). You can also FTP to Square One from a remote location over the Internet by connecting to its WAN IP address.
  2. Log in as "admin" and provide the administrator password ("squareone" by default).
  3. Your FTP client will initially show the contents of admin's home folder, whose path is /hdd/3/admin/. You'll need to navigate to the Web root folder, which is /hdd/3/htdocs/. To get there, go up to the parent folder, and then open the htdocs folder. This is where you will upload your Web documents.
  4. In your FTP client's local file browser (the window that shows the files on your computer), navigate to the folder where you've saved your Web files.
  5. Select the files you want to upload and copy them to the htdocs folder on Square One. (Tip: Most FTP clients let you drag files from Windows Explorer to the remote folder window.)
  6. When you're finished uploading your files, fire up your Web browser, navigate to http://192.168.1.1/ (substitute the IP address as necessary), and admire your handywork.

Notes

  • After uploading your web pages, if you still see Square One's default home page when you go to http://192.168.1.1/, you probably haven't replaced the default index.html file that resides in /hdd/3/htdocs/. To make your own home page appear without having to include a file name in the URL you type in your browser, be sure to replace the default index.html with your own (or if your index page file has a different name, like index.php, delete or rename index.html).
  • If your HTML files contain references to image files that are stored locally (as opposed to somewhere on the Web), make sure to upload those image files along with the HTML files to Square One. Also, make sure that the relative path of the image files from the HTML files is the same on Square One as it was on your computer: for example, if you have an image file that is in an images subfolder of the folder where the HTML file referencing it is on your computer, make sure to copy that images folder into the htdocs folder on Square One. Otherwise, the images on your Web pages will not appear.