mjfer.net

   
| about/ | files/ | fun/ | thoughts/ | tutorials/ |

TUTORIALS/WWW/HOW-TO-MAKE-THIS-SITE

how-to-make-this-site

Background

TL;DR get to the point

I think it was roughly the end of high school when I first had the idea I wanted to make some kind of website. This would be around 2010 and I did what I thought would be a good idea and bought a book on the subject: "Web Sites for Dummies." I was a dummy after all...

I got up to hyper linking with the "a" tag until I hit a wall. I don't want to link the exact page since I don't want to get sued, but it basically read:

Web design programs:
- Adobe Dreamweaver
- Adobe Contribute
- Microsoft Expression Web

Well, damn. I didn't have any of those. And as a stingy high school kid, I didn't want to buy anything. So I shelved that book and forgot about for a while since making a website seemed too expensive and needed too much flashy software to make it. I knew nothing about free software at that age, other than music software like Audacity which is what I was into at the time.

A few years later I caught a bit of a poetry bug--and maybe a bit of a snooty college kid bug--and tried to run a blog. At that point, I had learned about WordPress, which lets you easily make a space for sharing writing, media, content, whatever really. And it's free as in freedom as I understand since it's licensed under the GPL (if you want to take the time to deploy it yourself). But they also give out free .wordpress domains and some storage space with a snazzy dashboard to manage it all.

I had fun with that one, I don't update it anymore, but it's still up at postquantumpoetry.wordpress.com. WordPress got closer to what I wanted, but it still wasn't really my site; it was WordPress's site unless I wanted to pay the hosting and domain fee. It's pretty modest, but I wasn't sold on sticking with a .com or .space domain, or even sticking with WordPress. I was getting tired of blogging anyway. I was getting more interested in the stuff that made it work; it seemed a lot more fruitful than writing to no one.

It's now 2021, five years later, when I write this (and this website isn't even finished yet). So what led me down the rabbit hole again? It probably started where the last one left off, when I decided I wanted to switch to more practical IT things over the academic things I had previously wanted to pursue. I signed up for a Cybersecurity program, somehow got in, and eventually managed to land an entry-level SOC role after graduating. At this point, it was getting a little weird that I had no web presence, especially after I decided to take down most of my social media accounts a few years ago.

So I was back at "how do I make a website," again, but this time, I at least had some understanding of what a server was and how networks work. And more importantly, I had a better idea of what it meant for a computer to be mine.

Even though--let's be real--it still isn't.

I can't get high-speed Internet easily which I need to host a server long-term so I'm stuck using some else's computer, otherwise called a Virtual Private Server (VPS). Even if I could host at home, I'm still at the mercy of my ISP.

Because of that, I think it's important to understand that "running your own website" is not just a technical ordeal, but also an economic one since you have to carefully think about what it means to you to own your server, your software, and your hardware. That doesn't mean it's hard to do, just that there's options.

What is a web server and how do I run one?

TL;DR a web server is just a program that lets other computers on a network view files in a chosen folder. All you need to do is download a web server: apache and nginx are popular ones, but you can easily program your own with web frameworks like Flask or Facil

You can run a web server for free right now. These instructions will be for Linux just for consistency since I'm as used to setting this up on a Windows server. If you've never used Linux, don't be scared! It's very easy to setup and manage in Windows now with Windows Subsystem for Linux. If you're on Windows, follow their guide here. It should be pretty straightforward, but if you have any issues: 1) Make sure you check your Windows version as noted in the "Prerequisites," 2) Try a different distribution, like Debian with wsl --install -d Debian. Once you're at a command prompt, come back here.

There are many web servers out there, but I like nginx since the configuration file is a bit easier to read than others. So let's install it.

$ sudo apt install nginx

On Ubuntu or Debian, nginx puts the default server configuration in the folder "/etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default". Open that in a text editor like vim or nano, and you should see something like this (neglecting the commented lines starting with "#"):

server {
    listen 80 default_server;
    listen [::]:80 default_server;

    root /var/www/html;

    server_name _;

    location / {
        # First attempt to serve request as file, then
        # as directory, then fall back to displaying a 404.
        try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
    }
}

For now, you don't need to change anything, so don't worry about what it means.

But note the directory set on "root." This is where the web server looks for files and folders. You can change this, but usually, you don't need too. Any files or folders you put under "/var/www/html" will be included as part of the web server when viewed in a web browser.

So let's put some stuff there! If you're on WSL as mentioned before, you can access your C drive at "/mnt/c". So let's say you had a folder of cat pics in "C:\Users\username\Desktop\cats"; you can copy this into your website by running:

$ cp -vr /mnt/c/Users/username/Desktop/cats /var/www/html

Run the server, then go to your web browser and type: "http://localhost". You'll find a directory with your files in it! And you can access them at "http://localhost/foldername/filename.extension". Following our previous example, you can get your cats at "https://localhost/cats".

Getting from localhost to the internet

The problem is, only you and others on your home network can visit your site right now.

Your computer's most likely behind your router's firewall, which will not allow any traffic in. You'll need to forward a port from your router (port 80 is for HTTP) to point to the device hosting the server.

Router's differ when it comes to to exact configuration, but MOST routers will have some kind of steps similar to this:

  1. Click "Advanced" then click "Firewall"

  2. Scroll to the add new rule form

  3. Put in the following values:

You can get your device's local ip by typing "ipconfig" (Windows) or "ip a" (Linux). Typically it is listed first and will start with "192.168" or "10.0" but it depends on the manufacturer. Here's my output at home for example:

1: lo: <LOOPBACK,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 65536 qdisc noqueue state UNKNOWN group default qlen 1000
    link/loopback 00:00:00:00:00:00 brd 00:00:00:00:00:00
    inet 127.0.0.1/8 scope host lo
       valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever
    inet6 ::1/128 scope host
       valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever
2: enp7s0: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 1500 qdisc pfifo_fast state UP group default qlen 1000
    link/ether 4c:cc:6a:93:eb:0b brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
    inet 192.168.1.202/24 brd 192.168.1.255 scope global dynamic noprefixroute enp7s0
       valid_lft 74501sec preferred_lft 74501sec
    inet6 fe80::4ecc:6aff:fe93:eb0b/64 scope link noprefixroute
       valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever
3: wlp5s0: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST> mtu 1500 qdisc noop state DOWN group default qlen 1000
    link/ether 82:e2:e4:c2:0c:a1 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff permaddr 98:de:d0:f3:d6:ea

The device "enp7s0" is my Ethernet adapter (starts with an 'e') and my current local ip address for the device is shown. If you use wifi, it will likely start with a "wl." Set the forwarding rule according to this value.

Now get your public ip address at this site https://who.is/ and share it with your friends. Watch in horror as they access all the files in the directory you launched the server!

How can I make this server available on the Internet cheaply and independently

TL;DR Expense scales with independence. It's possible to become your own service provider, get IP addresses from ICANN, your own hardware to host it, to host your cat pics; but it's also a lot of time, work and money to do all that (this guy did it apparently, and so did Null)

Most likely you'll want to rent someone else's server, usually a VPS.

Once you understand the basic installation above, you can now populate your site with content just by adding HTML files to your web directory. You can use an HTML editor to write these, or you can download a full content management system to help you. Here are some options I know about:

This honestly is not that hard, it just takes long and takes away from the joy of writing in my opinion. I personally have set up my own little system where I write content in markdown and templates in the Jinja template language to render it automatically. But if your content is short and sweet, or you're mostly hosting files, writing a few basic HTML files in vim or notepad and adding some CSS goes a long way. I wrote my own view of the topic in the context of how I wrote this site here. And you can find a number of great guides on how to write files, copy them and manage them in the references.

One easy way to create HTML templates with these servers is through the use of "Server Side Includes," which essentially let you past one html document into another. This varies by server, for example, nginx has their own options and syntax detailed here.

Neocities is based on the old Geocities from the mid 90s which allows simple static hosting and features and amazing array of creative projects. Everything is managed through the website, and you can pay to set your own custom domain name.

Before wordpress was a social media blogging thingamajig, it was just a content management system to spin up a pretty blog. You can download and install Wordpress here

The benefit of installing yourself is enormous, since you have full control and can even edit the source if you have the guts.

In addition to hosting code repositories, you can host small sites on github for mostly free. I've never used it, but I definitely would if I needed something like a small wiki.

But once you have stuff to share, how do you keep this stuff online?

Can I run a web server at home

Technically yes, but practically probably not. At least not at a lot of extra cost to you. If you do want to host a small thing at home, like some text or some cat pics, a tor hidden service is a great option.

I spent a lot of time searching on this (you can find a full list of references at the bottom), and I've even tested a little bit by hosting game servers and web projects for code jams, but the problem is twofold. First, if you are in the United States and not a business, you probably have a standard plan with one of the major ISPs (Verizon, Optimum, etc.). This limits you in a few ways.

So what should I do

As mentioned above, it kind of depends on what your hosting. A small game server can be run just fine from home. A website with an email server and other bells and whistles is another thing.

In those cases most people will find it cheapest to rent from a VPS provider. VPS stands for "Virtual Private Server," which just means an Internet-connected server stored somewhere in someone's private data center. You pay them for the storage and to keep your server online and accessible.

Once you've got enough content and a way to manage it, all you have to do is just copy all that stuff over to your VPS. Usually that looks like:

And in a nutshell that's it. There's fancy stuff of course, like you'll want a domain name probably and I'll talk about that too, but at this point, your stuff is on the Internet! Just tell your friends to paste in your public ip address (your VPS provider will tell you this) and there's your stuff!

What's a "Domain Name"

Expecting people to save your IP address is not really a good idea though. It's better to have an easy name they can remember. Enter DNS: the Domain Name System. If an IP address is a telephone number, DNS is the telephone book. ICANN and IANA host the top level servers, which point to local domain registries who buy names like "mjfer.net" on behalf of their customers.

The actual business of domain names is complicated and not something I understand all that well. But setting up a domain name to point to an IP address is typically easy, once you've chosen a domain registrar (just search that online and you'll find a ton) and name you like. Be aware that shorter names are rarer and usually more expensive and different TLDs--that is, the ending parts like ".net" and ".io,"--will be priced differently.

Once you have a domain name, you'll need to set up a DNS record. Again, this varies a bit based on the provider, but all will have some kind of text input or API where you can edit DNS records. You'll want to make two records

The reason for the second record is in case you want to set subdomains on the same IP address like "git.mjfer.net".

Wait a few minutes for the DNS servers to update and you should now be able access your server by name.

Setup HTTPS and TLS, for some sense of security

A decade of half-thought through security advice has convinced everyone that HTTPS and only HTTPS is secure. This is simply not true. Using HTTP alone doesn't inherently make you insecure and using HTTPS doesn't automatically guarantee the app your communicating with is secure.

What HTTPS means is that the data you send to the server and the data the server sends back is encrypted. This only provides security in contexts where you're entering information like a credit card number or a password; or in the reverse case when the server is authenticating you. In those cases you need HTTPS. But if you're just requesting a text document, or a cat picture, and not sending any data, HTTP is perfectly acceptable for retrieving that information. HTTPS is also no guarantee that the information your retrieving is actually what you want. There's plenty of malware and other nasty things over HTTPS, just because it's sent encrypted doesn't make it safe.

Web browsers have largely responded to this fact by assuming that HTTP is always insecure and printing a warning when you visit a site without HTTPS enabled. Unfortunately, most users interpret this to mean the site is somehow dangerous, even if it doesn't collect any information about the user. Because of that, most you will want to go the extra mile to make your visitors feel warm and fuzzy inside and implement HTTPS.

Fortunately, this is now much easier than is used to be thanks to LetsEncrypt. LetsEncrypt generously serves as a free certificate authority, which allows you to generate signed certificates that are recognized by every web browser in the world. The tool they recommend, certbot is painless to install. I've rarely had to do much more than "certbot certonly" and follow the prompts to get a certificate. Once you've obtained one, add it to apache or nginx, switch the port to 443 instead of 80 and bam, you've got HTTPS!

Perspective

What I tried to present here was the brief overview of how you get from files on your computer to files accessible on the Internet. The full picture though is something you need to seek out yourself. I intend to add more guides on how I manage this site as I learn but there is so much material out there already it hardly feels worth adding to. I hope at the very least to have got you through the start.

References

  1. https://dataswamp.org/~solene/2021-07-23-why-selfhosting-is-important.html
  2. https://selfhostedweb.org/yourserver/
  3. https://www.howtogeek.com/362602/can-you-host-a-web-server-on-your-home-internet-connection/
  4. https://googiehost.com/blog/create-your-own-server-at-home-for-web-hosting/
  5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICANN
  6. https://landchad.net/

Terms of service for certain ISPs

There's always more ISPs out there, but I went with the one's I'm most familiar with in my area. I'll probably expand this as I go, let me know if there are important ones in your area worth listing here for others.

Verizon

Optimum

Spectrum

AT&T

Cox Communications

Go up to parent folder (/tutorials/www)

CC0
To the extent possible under law, The author has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to content on mjfer.net. All work may be cited without attribution at the reader's discretion. However, if you do use the work here, or otherwise benefit from it, the author would love to hear about it! This work is published from: United States.