Hi, this video is gonna be a quick
tutorial on the cPanel interface for
managing your site.
Let's go ahead and say that you've gotten
a job or you have a homework assignment,
and someone says, hey.
I want you to go ahead and
put your site up on the web.
Many people's first reaction is,
great, how do I do that?
So, one of the most common ways
is to use the CPanel interface.
In order to use it, what you need to do is
have the URL for your cPanel account, or
your web hosting account.
So if you have a domain name,
such as introwebdesign.com or
yourname.com, when you created your
account, and you got your domain name and
hosting service, they should've sent you
an email that says what your URL is.
So usually your domain name followed by
slash cPanel is where you need to go.
Once you go there, you come to a nice
login where you can access your different
files, and I'm gonna show you in
real time in just a few minutes.
So, what a file manager
does is that it's a way for
you to upload or download your files.
This means you take them from your
computer and you put them up onto the web.
So, regardless of the kind of CPL
configuration you have, one of the first
things you wanna learn how to do is
figure out how to find the File Manager.
From the File Manager, you're going
to look for a special folder called
public_html, or in some cases just public,
or they may have dropped the html.
But the important thing is that
you want to find the word public.
Your public_html folder is going
to have a lot of different files,
some that you want people to see,
and some that you don't.
I mean, if you think about it, when you
go to Amazon or other different sites,
there are certain pages they want you to
be able to access, but there are many more
important, confidential files that
you should not be able to get to.
So uploading files to your public HTML
folder makes them viewable to the public.
So let's say that we're at my website,
and I decide I wanna upload a new file.
In fact, here's a file right here.
It's a pretty simple one,
it's not even a full file, and
it is just a file with
two images of my dog.
Okay, so I would go here, and I would go
to my URL, and I would add on cPanel.
What should pop up from here,
is a username and place for
me to enter my password.
Now if you're not sure what
your username and password are,
just make sure to go back to the email
that your hosting service sent to you.
They'll tell you what it is.
So once I log in,
you tend to have a fairly familiar
site set up when you're using cPanel.
Now, different cPanel accounts are gonna
have different software that you can use,
but the one thing that they will all have
is something called the File Manager.
So head down here, and
I find the File Manager.
There's gonna be lots
of different options.
I usually just go with the default or
find where it says public _html.
All right, so when I login,
everyone's is going to look different
because it depends on what
files you've already uploaded.
For many of you, the first time you go in,
you will only see the cgi-bin folder.
Go ahead and leave that alone.
So I wanna upload my file over here.
So I'm gonna go ahead and
go to Upload > Choose File, and
I am going to pick, oops,
it's right up here.
Safari images, short.html.
Here we go.
All right,
as you can see down in the corner,
it's showing that it should
be uploading correctly.
So go over here, and
I want to check and make sure it there.
Oh, it didn't work, and now we wanna
think about why that didn't work.
Okay, so I have here some
issues that may have gone on
along with the one I already showed you,
and that is wait, why can't I see my file?
Well, there are three main reasons.
The first might be that you
typed in the wrong URL.
So, go back and check that out again.
Did I make sure to type
in the right file name?
Maybe I forgot I had an s or
something else down there.
Second, when you uploaded the file,
the transfer didn't work.
So many times when you're uploading,
you wanna make sure that there weren't
any error messages on the cPanel.
The final one,
which we'll show you right here,
is that when you uploaded the file, you
did not have what we call read access, and
this happens a lot when
you're dealing with images.
What this means is that
your computer said, oh,
sure, I'll put this file on your site, but
I'm not gonna let anybody else see it.
So, what we need to do, is we need to go
in and we need to change the permissions
for that image, and
I can show you how to do it right now.
So, one of the things that I wanna do
is I wanna look at the code that was
uploaded to the server.
So, I'm gonna go ahead and do,
I did a right a click, and
now I'm gonna do View Page Source.
And you can see that it says
the pictures that it's looking for
are both called bacon and
they're inside an images folder.
Oh, well,
that's where my first mistake was.
Let's go back over here,
and you can see, oh, great.
I'm gonna reload it.
Here's that HTML file uploaded.
I completely forgot to upload
the images that go with the HTML file.
So I'm gonna go ahead and
create a new folder.
Call it images, and I'm gonna upload it.
And from there,
I am going to upload the picture.
Great.
So let's go over and check and
see how we're going.
Oops, that's not the right one.
I'm going to refresh it.
Oh, great.
Look, it worked for
one of my files, but not the other.
So let's look at that
source code one more time.
And you can see that I put
in an intentional mistake.
When you're working locally, when you're
creating files on your C drive or
your desktop, your browser's very nice.
It's kind of like the helicopter
parenting of browsers.
And it'll say, oh, I know what she meant.
So here, I put the wrong file extension,
I used capital J-P-G,
instead of lower cased.
So, while it was great for
then, that's not so great now.
So what I wanna do, is I wanna go
back over here, go up one folder.
I'm going to what we call work
on this here, Code Editor.
And I'm going to change this to jpg.
Let's see how it goes.
Great, now our pictures are working.
So, what you may notice is that I went in,
and
I changed my file as it was on the server.
There are two different
ways to change your files.
One, is you can edit your files via
cPanel, but I don't normally do that.
Instead, what I like to do
is I like to work locally,
which means I only change my files when
they're on my laptop or my desktop.
The reason that I don't like to
make changes on cPanel is that,
first of all,
the changes are immediately public.
So if you put in a typo or something you
didn't mean to have, it's out there, and
you can't really fix it.
Secondly, there's less
opportunity to test and debug.
So sometimes during my lectures I may show
you that I'm working on files on cPanel,
but I really avoid doing that.
So at some point you are more
than likely to be using
cPanel to upload files to your server.
Different version of cPanels
are gonna offer different tools
depending on if you're using a paid or
a free site even among paid sites,
there are many different variations.
One of the things that you should do if
you're interested in becoming more of
an administrator is look into
the different administrative tools
that CPanel often offers.
There are emails accounts,
database management and cron jobs.
Cron jobs are one of my favorite, because
I teach all my freshman how to have their
email automatically sent to their mothers
at 9 AM saying they're studying hard.
An alternative to using cPanel is to use
something such as SFTP to transfer files,
or other file transfer protocols.
But the important thing to do is to
learn that when you're using cPanel,
you're going to make little mistakes and
little things aren't going to work.
The important thing to do is to relax, go
in and follow the three steps I mentioned.
Make sure you uploaded the file.
Make sure you don't have any typos.
And make sure that you have the permission
set to the way they need to be.
If you do that, you should be fine.
