Section outline

  • Introduction

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    The material here is from the first 6 weeks of a course on web services at Bilgi University.

    It is usable as it stands, provided you follow the instructions carefully. Small problems may arise when you try different suppliers and different GNU/Linux distributions

    I am in the process of updating and simplifying the worksheets here in the light of the experiences of the students taking that course. The material will also be generalized to cover directly more suppliers and more software versions and GNU/Linux distributions

    My thanks to the students who took the course at Bilgi for their patience and for their contributions

     

    • News forum
      General news and announcements
    • User forum

      Post your requests for help on the material in this course here!

      Registration required (but it is easy and free)

    • GitHub student pack URL

      Use this to get Digital Ocean credit of $50 (and many other useful goodies) if you are a registered university student and have a university provided email address.

    • Digital Ocean promotion link URL

      Use this link to get a $10 credit on Digital Ocean, if you are not a registered student with a university provided email address.

      If you spend over $25 after your credit runs out, then a credit will go back to the droplet on which this server is running.

    • Free .tk domain name link URL

      You can get a domain name, free for a year, from this link. The GitHub student pack also has an introductory free domain name offer, so check that out, too, if you are a registered student, with an educational email address

    • Solving Digital Ocean Account problems Page

      I raised a ticket with Digital Ocean about the verification problems some students have been having.

      Use this page to get your account unblocked.

  • Getting started

    Setting up a droplet and beginning to use the command line.

  • Securing the server and installing software

    Basic security precautions, getting some necessary programs loaded, more work with the command line

  • Making our server multi-user

    We learn about file permissions and ownership and how several users can share the server securely

  • Domain names and Apache configuration

    We learn how to set up domain names, both locally and through the Domain Name System, and how to serve multiple domains from one server by configuring virtual hosts on Apache and giving secure access to multiple users to update their sites.

  • Getting Apache up and running

    We will now show that we can support multiple web sites on our droplet.

  • On to Wordpress

    We show that we now have a useful system by installing the Wordpress blogging software on just one of our multiple domains.