How can I make a public HTML folder in Ubuntu?

Question

Simple question, but for some reason I couldn\'t find the exact answer on Google:

I have a fresh Ubuntu install on Slicehost, and would like to make a public directory i

Answer 1

Assuming you've already installed apache, do the following:

sudo a2enmod userdir
sudo service apache2 reload

The first command enables the userdir apache mod, which does exactly what you want. The second reloads apache configurations so that it starts using the new configuration.

To install apache2:

sudo apt-get install apache2

Of course, you'll also need to make sure that the permissions on your public_html folder allow the www-data user to see the files in there -- 755 usually works well. To do this:

mkdir ~/public_html
chmod -R 755 ~/public_html

This will recursively (-R) go through your public_html and set the permissions to 755 (owner rwx, and both group and other r-x, r-x).