Server Root Directories

ll information that is web-accessible from techstaff-managed systems^* is stored under /stage/w3serv (which is an NFS-mounted directory, and thus available everywhere). Each separate virtual host has its own subdirectory of /stage/w3serv. So, for example, content on http://bioinformatics.cs.uchicago.edu is found under /stage/w3serv/bioinformatics.cs.uchicago.edu. We refer to these directories as virtual host roots or server roots.

Each server root has a set of common subdirectories. If it has web-accessible documents, they are stored in the docs/ directory (see the aside on the convention for writing filenames). If it has Apache configuration information, that is stored under conf/. Any other information which should not be web-accessible is stored in other subdirectories of the server root, such as phplib/ for PHP-based virtual hosts.

^*With the exception of personal home pages, which are stored within users' home directories.