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.