Official/Public Web Hosting
This site is for information related to SECS web hosting for clubs, organizations, and departments related to the School of Engineering and Computer Science. If you are looking for information on hosting a personal site (secs.oakland.edu/~username) then please see
our personal web hosting page. If you would like to create a non personal website on our server, you will need to gain approval from a department chair or the Dean's office. For new development project, or site overhaul's we recommend utilizing the Universities
Content management System(CMS) as an alternative to hosting your site on the SECS web server. The CMS allows for easy editing/updating, as well as providing the consistent Oakland University website look. This site was built using the CMS. The account representative for the SECS is Daniel Bordene (bodene@oakland.edu) and should be your first point of contact for creating a new CMS website.
About our Environment
A wide variety of development options are supported. Including PHP, Perl, Css, html, Server side includes, Jquery, mysql, and Java. We have a test and production environment. You can ssh, scp and view your web pages using the test environment. The expected work flow is to upload and edit files in the Test environment, View the changes you have made on the test server, and then when you have completed your testing promote the changes to the production environment.
Adhere to Policy #860 found on
http://www.oakland.edu/uts/policies. Do not store personally identifiable information such as G#'s or other confidential data, on the SECS webserver or any other SECS server without gaining approval from a data steward and
contacting the cto.
Uploading and editing files in the Test environment
To upload files to the test environment scp (we recommend winSCP from windows) using test.secs.oakland.edu as your host. You must be on campus or connected to the
vpn.
Viewing your changes in the Test environment
You can then view your page in a web browser, by using test.yoursite. So if you site is cse.secs.oakland.edu, then you could view the test version of your site at test.cse.secs.oakland.edu. Again this is only available from on campus or by using the vpn.
Promoting changes from the Test to Production environments
Once you are happy with your changes and would like to promote your site from the test environment to the production environment. An authorized promoter can run a promotion script located in /srv/webScripts/. This script will sync the website directories on the test and production web server. Each site ideally should only have one promoter, who should be someone other then a developer.
Steps required by Authorized promoter to promote site:
- connect to the Oakland university wired network or vpn.
- ssh into test.secs.oakland.edu
Steps 3-5 are only required if you do not know the name of your promotion script
- navigate to the web scripts directory entering the following command:
cd /srv/webScripts
- view the available command by enter the following command:
ls
- find the command that is for your website. It should start with the word promote. Note the name of your script
- Run you command by entering the following command where Site is replaced by the name of your site
/srv/webScripts/promoteSite.sh
Details: The ownership and permission will not be preserved when moving to the production environment. By default only Apache will be able to read and execute the files in your web directory. If you need more advanced permissions, please contact us. Also please not that the database data and schema will not be promoted. This is expected because test and production data should be different. You can still use phpMyAdmin, in both the test and production environments. If you need a more robust solution please contact us.