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Understanding the server's Directory structure

The example above is a typical example of a directory structure. Your personal folder, at the top of the drawing above, is called rootfolder for the purpose of showing an example, but its actual name will of course be different for your account. If your username is for example "john", then the folder will most likely be called the same.

The red folders in the above example are the only ones "seen" by the web server software, so your whole site must reside in this "home" folder or it will never be seen or accessible on the web. The "Images" folder is just an example commonly used to place all the media files in, pictures, sounds or anything else. Any directory structure in the "home" directory can be used and will be reflected on the web just the same.

Let's take an example of an account with a domain name, say "www.mydomain.com", everything located in the "home" folder will show up at the same level and will be accessed with "http://www.mydomain.com/", if an "index" file is found (it is advised to always have one), it will be served by default to the client accessing the URL, otherwise an index of the contents of the folder will be returned by the server (this should be avoided, at least for the root document folder), check the list of usable index files for a list of names. If you have subfolders in your "home" folder, then it will become part of the URL on the web. For example if you have a folder called "info" in your "home" folder, it will be accessed on the web as "http://www.mydomain.com/info/" and the default index file will be served if it exists. If there is an other folder inside that previous folder, then it will simply be added to the URL in the same manner and so on...

The green folders in the drawing above, also contain your personal files, your cgi scripts belong in the "cgi-bin" folder (if you have the cgi option turned on) and if you have autoresponders, your reply text files belong in the green "replies" folder located in the ".procmail" folder. If you have autoresponders setup and you want to keep track of transactions, you can enable the logging in the ".procmailrc" file located in your root folder, then your logs will end up in the "logs" folder which is located in the ".procmail" folder.

If the account is one with a domain name, you will find the web server's log files in the brown folder called "logs". The web server log files are called "access", "cgierrors" and "errors" and are standard log files that can be used to make statistics.

NOTE: In this technical support area, you may find that the "directory" and "folder" words are used interchangeably, they mean the same thing, while "folder" may be more visual and more understandable than "directory".

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