FTP Tutorial

This guide will help you get to work with an FTP client, so that you can easily transfer your webs to your hosting space. This example shows the setup of the GFTP client, which is available free for Linux. Regardless of the FTP client, the procedure is much the same.

Step 1: Getting Started
The prerequsites for using FTP are as follows:

Your hosting scotland username
Your hosting scotland password
Your domain name (eg: mydomainname.com).

Enter your domain name into the box that says 'Host:'
Enter your username and password into the relevant boxes.
Press the Connect button, to establish the FTP game, if you wish, why not save these settings with the Bookmarks/Favourites option, so you don't have to enter it over again.



Step 2: Uploading and Downloading
On the left hand window of the FTP Client, you will be able to see your own computer's files (this is known as the Local site).
Browse through your own folders until you find the folder that has your web site content in it.

Now, you will see the remote view to the right hand side.
Using the remote view, you can navigate to the folder which is designated to hold your web sites. This folder is usually in the following format:

/www/<username>/<domainname.com>/html/

You may often find that you automatically begin your FTP session in the /www/<username>/ folder already.

Tip: You will notice that the folder logs also exists. This folder contains information about who has accessed your sites, and whether any errors are being produced by your site (eg, missing images).

To upload content to your site, simply drag and drop the files you wish to upload from the left window (local view), to the correct folder (html) in the right window (remote view). To download from your site to your computer, simply drag from remote view to local view. If you cannot drag/drop for any reason, then the FTP client usually provides an arrow button, which you can see on the below diagram. Simply select the files you wish to transfer and press the appropriate arrow button to indicate which way you wish to transfer files.

Remember, that your first (front)) page, should always be named index.html or index.php. .htm extensions are not valid.



Setting Permissions on files and folders
If all you do is transfer images and your own web pages to your site, then you should not need to read this section. However, if you upload any third party software or scripts, this information will often prove invaluable in order to getting your script or additional web folder working correctly.

Whats a permission?

A permission is simply as it sounds - it defines who is allowed to access a file or folder, and what actions are permitted upon a file or folder.
A script is a special file, because it must be executed or ran (like double clicking a file in windows).
Permissions are seperated into users, groups and others (ugo)
If you upload a file to the web, you are the owner of the file, therefore you are the 'user' of that file.
However, if you wish to permit others access to this file or folder, such as visitors to your web site, you must permit others to view the file too.
Group ownership means that system administrators can allow a specified group of users access to a file or folder.
If you own a file, you can change the permissions on it, as demonstrated in the screenshot below.




You can see that the user can read and write (view and alter) the file entitled script.pl. Furthermore, you can see that any groups that own the file can read it also. Finally, anyone else (other), can also read the file. This final element (other) is the most important in this case, as this content would not be visible to the web, unless a 'read' permission was granted by yourself here. Instead, the web visitor would get a '403 Forbidden' error message.
Files ending in .pl or .cgi are usually CGI/Perl scripts, and this means that they must be executed, so in order for this sort of file to work, the execute flag must also be set for 'Others' also.
Finally, you must ensure that any parent folders (ie, this example stores the script.pl file in a folder called cgi-bin) have an execute permission also, in order for the files within it to be executed.

Tip: If you read somewhere, that permissions should be set to something like '755', this is the 'octal numbering' representation of a permission. For example, 755 means read, write, execute for users (7), and read/execute for groups (5) and others (5).

For further information about permissions, visit The Ultimate Linux Newbie Guide [www.linuxnewbieguide.org], (chapter 11 specifically)