Got lots of help and advice this evening from my mate who is a bit of a wizard with computers.

This evening I learnt these handy commands:

(find . -type f -name ‘*.htm*’); do
(to find all files within a directory that end in .htm or .hmtl or .htmanything)
tar cvzf ~/mybackup.tar .
(to back up the current directory to the home directory.
cvzf stands for c: create archive, v: verbose, z: use compression, f: use the following filename)
ls ~/mybackup.tar
(to list the contents of the backup)
mv ~/mybackup.tar ~/websites.20070926.tgz
(to move the backup into a directory dated today)
mkdir ~/websitebackups
(to make a new directory in the home directory)
mv ~/*tgz ~/*backups
(to move all directories ending in tgz to the directory ending in backups – in this case, moving the one file we created earlier)

The purpose of all this was to prepare to change the URLs inside all of my web files from absolute to relative. Still not done that part yet.

Oh, I have got as far as changing the permissions across all directories in /var/www/ also, which was simply done by

sudo chmod 755 -R *

Piece of cake.

One last thing was the command;

gksu nautilus
(which opens the file server in su mode, so that files can be copied over using the GUI. I am still a bit wet behind the ears, and like the good old drag and drop files in Linux). I will learn to do it all through the terminal eventually. One thing at a time.

OK, just found out where I am going wrong. And I am going wrong in more ways than one. Firstly, I need to modify the /etc/apache2/sites-available/default to allow .htaccess rules to override the httpd.conf. Really I should not use .htaccess, but as I am using my Linux as a test environment for my Tranquillizer website, which does use .htaccess, I will stick with it for now.

So this is what I am about to do:

In /etc/apache2/sites-available/default:
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
AllowOverride None
Order allow,deny
allow from all
# Uncomment this directive is you want to see apache2′s
# default start page (in /apache2-default) when you go to /
#RedirectMatch ^/$ /apache2-default/

I shall change “AllowOverride None” to “AllowOverride All”

This tells Apache that it’s okay to allow .htaccess files to over-ride previous directives. This means that I can get php code parsed inside html files, which is essential for my template system. I place this code into my .htaccess:

RemoveHandler .html .htm
AddType application/x-httpd-php .php .htm .html

Then I need to restart Apache so that the changes take effect. I’ll report back in a moment.

Update: Success!!! I did not need to restart Apache, the instruction was:

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 reload

Which seems subtly different. It worked though. So I now have a test web environment for my static pages. Next task is to set up MySQL so that I can test and develop my Drupal, Pligg and phpdirectory subdomains.

Final question I have…… and will hopefully find an answer for is:

When viewing pages in http://localhost/ all links obviously point to the “wrong” place, i.e. the live website. How do I make it so that tranquillizer.co.uk is always replaced with http://localhost/ ? If that is possible, then I will be able to navigate around my test environment. I am sure it is, and if not, what is the solution to navigating through sites on the server?

Just found this page on the Ubuntu website, bookmarking it here. Looks like need to make some changes to get the .htaccess working. Also seems that I could have installed LAMP automatically with this command:

To install the default LAMP stack in Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn)

In Feisty, the Ubuntu base system includes Tasksel. You can either install LAMP using tasksel or install the LAMP packages as detailed above.

sudo tasksel install lamp-server

The site also explains how to uninstall if everything goes pearshaped. Hopefully it will not come to that!

I think that I found the solution, or at least a solution (it does not seem ideal).

I typed this:

sudo chmod -R 755 ./directory

and it works.

But, this leads to questions:

1. There must be one command to change permissions for all subdirectories?
2. why ./articles and not just articles? When using chmod on my webhost server, I never typed ./ to change permissions for a directory (I use Jumpline.com if that helps at all).
3. Most important question – is this the correct thing to do, or are there security risks once I go online with my website? Security is something that I know nothing about (yes, even less than I know about Linux in general!) and I keep seeing threads about it, which worries me.

OK, it seems that I have a problem with permissions now (I initially thought that my .htaccess file is missing, which has code in to allow php to be parsed in html files).

Anyway, I decided to create a new .htaccess first, using:

sudo gedit /var/www/.htaccess

and got this message:

(gedit:8583): GnomeUI-WARNING **: While connecting to session manager:
Authentication Rejected, reason : None of the authentication protocols specified are supported and host-based authentication failed.

gedit opened OK, so I went ahead anyway and added my code;

RemoveHandler .html .htm
AddType application/x-httpd-php .php .htm .html

But same problem occurred. I then had a hunch that the .htaccess was there all along, chose to view hidden files, and can see it. So, what is the problem? Permissions again? I think so…

I managed to change the permissions of the directory /var/www/ so can now view all items within. However, I cannot seem to view items in the subdirectories, and the php is not being parsed / processed either.

I have attempted the following:

root@jon-desktop:/var/www# chmod -R 755 *.*
and
root@jon-desktop:/var# chmod 755 www

but still no luck. Regardng the php, maybe the server is not configured correctly. When I had my site hosted at 1and1 I could not parse php in html files, which is why I moved to Jumpline. Maybe I have a “1and1″ set up?

Need professional assistance. Stanbey?

OK, last night I installed Apache and PHP. I was going to install MySQL this evening, but I decided that instead I would start with the next project I have, which is updating the template for Tranquillizer. So I thought that the most sensible way to do this would be to upload all the files to the server and work on it in Linux, rather than work on it in the editor then upload to my web host’s server without any testing.

First problem I had was that I did not have permission to copy files to /var/www/

I searched Google, and found an instruction, which I followed:

chown -R jon /var/www/

I then simply copied the files from my external USB drive to the directory. I really need to find out how to copy direct from windows. Was asked for a password when I tried. Anyway, once all files were copied over, I pointed the broswer to http://localhost/ again, but this time was greeted with

Forbidden

You don’t have permission to access /index.html on this server.