making a website server...

[excalibur313]

I have a computer in a lab that I work in and I want to monitor the pressure of something using a webcam. It has a program where it will publish a picture every 15 seconds to a ftp site so I decided to make my own ftp site on that computer for it to upload to. My question is how do I go about making it so that I can upload to a folder and then publish that to a particular site (eg http://123.23.023... etc). It is formatting it perfectly (there is an index.html page and everything) but just not in a way that you can view it as a webpage. Do I have to get a program that will turn that computer into a website server as well or can I get away with using the ftp server? Is there a way that is even easier that I am overlooking? I know, for example, xoom.com, a free webpage host, allowed you to upload your website stuff directly to it using ftp and then it turned around and displayed it. Are there other free hosting options where I could use ftp to get it on the site?

 

[janey]

not sure i quite understand what you're asking, but why can't you just turn on the webserver in OS X and just use that?

 

[Blackheart]

Turn on Personal Web Sharing in System Preferences (under the Sharing pane). After that, you can go to http://127.0.0.1/ (this is a loopback, you'll need the real IP if you want to access from elsewhere) and it will pull files from /Library/WebServer/Documents. If you want to edit this to point to a different directory, then edit the following part of /etc/httpd/httpd.conf :

#
# DocumentRoot: The directory out of which you will serve your
# documents. By default, all requests are taken from this directory, but
# symbolic links and aliases may be used to point to other locations.
#
DocumentRoot "/Library/WebServer/Documents"

 

[excalibur313]

I guess I wasn't sure what the connection between ftp and http is. Just because I have an ftp server for a particular folder in order to view the information in that folder as a website I must start a webserver and set it to that same folder right?

Okay great thanks!

 

[mkrishnan]

I guess I wasn't sure what the connection between ftp and http is. Just because I have an ftp server for a particular folder in order to view the information in that folder as a website I must start a webserver and set it to that same folder right?

Okay great thanks!

If you turn on the webserver, it will create a Sites folder in your home folder. Anything placed inside automatically becomes visible at http://(your IP address)/~(your user name) (no parenthesis).

If you have an FTP server running, you can probably also access the pictures from the other computer without doing anything extra by changing the address from http:// to ftp://

 

[excalibur313]

If you have an FTP server running, you can probably also access the pictures from the other computer without doing anything extra by changing the address from http:// to ftp://

Yeah I tried it and it didn't seem to like that. I was using a third party application though so maybe the one built into os x has more features. Thanks for your help.