note on web server

Note: Below tips are based on CentOS (member of RedHat family, incl. Fedora). For other systems, like Debian/Ubuntu/Mint/SUSE/Mac OS, this may not work.

1. How to add new users?

$ sudo vi /etc/group 

and find line with 

users:x:100:xxx,yyy,zzz

and add new username behind. 

* for an independent system (unlike ours which is a virtual server attached to the main cluster), you may want to use useradd <username> to add new users. See detail here.

2. How to Enable Userdir (Public_html)?

$ sudo vi /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf 

and find the following part and 

<IfModule mod_userdir.c>

    #UserDir disabled

    UserDir enabled xxx yyy zzz

    UserDir public_html

</IfModule>

then restart apache by

$ sudo /etc/rc.d/init.d/httpd restart

Now you should be able to see the file content:

http://yourdomain.name/~xxx

If you got a 403 error, you should change the folder/file permission to 0755 and 0644, respectively. 

3. How to change permission to a folder and all of its subfolders and files?

To set the directories to 755 and set the files to 644, you can use the find command. For example:

To change all the directories to 755 (-rwxr-xr-x):

find ~/public_html/myfolder -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \;

To change all the files to 644 (-rw-r--r--):

find ~/public_html/myfolder -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \;

Ref: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3740152/how-to-set-chmod-for-a-folder-and-all-of-its-subfolders-and-files-in-linux-ubunt

4. How to set password for Userdir (Public_html)?

Change to and/or specify directory to protect in /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf:

<Directory /home/xxx/public_html> AllowOverride All </Directory>

OR

<Directory /home/xxx/public_html> AllowOverride AuthConfig </Directory>

Create a file /home/xxx/public_html/.htaccess in that director that looks something like this:

AuthName "Add your login message here." AuthType Basic AuthUserFile /home/xxx/public_html/.htpasswd AuthGroupFile /dev/null require user name-of-user

In this case the "name-of-user" is the login name you wish to use for accessing the web site.

Create (or clobber if it already exists) the password file /home/xxx/public_html/.htpasswd using the program htpasswd:
htpasswd -c .htpasswd name-of-user

Add a new user to the existing password file:
htpasswd .htpasswd name-of-user
Password file protection, ownership attributes:
File privileges: chmod ug+rw .htpasswd
File ownership: chown apache.apache .htpasswd

More method on encrypting a site can be found here: http://www.yolinux.com/TUTORIALS/LinuxTutorialApacheAddingLoginSiteProtection.html
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