Publishing to your Computer

Previous Step

This article is part of the "Setting Up Your Host" procedure, and is for you if you have decided to publish a site to your own computer. The previous step of this process is "Choosing a Publishing Location."

Publishing to your computer is generally not suitable for a home setup. It requires your computer to be turned on all the time and accessible from the Internet.

For full information on ensuring your computer is correctly set up for local publishing, please see the "Preparing for Publishing to Your Computer" article. If you encounter any issues while attempting to publish to your computer, please refer to the article to ensure everything is set up correctly.

Publishing Settings

You are presented with the publishing settings for your computer like this:

Publishing Location

When publishing to your computer, you can either store the site in your Home Folder, or the root of the computer:

My Home Directory
The site is published to the "Sites" folder in your Home folder. Allows a different site or sites to be published for each user of the computer.
Computer
Makes the site the primary one for the whole computer. It is published to:
Library → Webserver → Documents
In order to publish, you must have permission to write to this folder. If you do not have the necessary permissions, Sandvox will request an administrator's password to enable them.


If you particularly need to publish to a different location on your computer (for example, if you have another web server installed), then it is possible to change the location of the "Computer" option using the Hidden Preferences.

Hostname

The Hostname of your computer is the address at which the site will be reachable once it is published. Into this box, you can enter any valid domain name or IP address. Please see the "Preparing for Publishing to Your Computer" article for information on how to find a suitable IP address to use.

Alternatively, you may be publishing the site to your computer for use on your intranet. If so, please see "Publishing a site for use in an intranet" for more information.

Subfolder

If you are hosting more than one site in your Home Folder or Computer, you must place them each in a separate subfolder. If you are only hosting one site, there is no need to enter a subfolder.

To use a subfolder, simply enter it in the box. Note that you cannot use any unsuitable characters such as spaces.

Next Step

To continue onto the next step, click the "Continue" button to move on to the Host Summary. This will tell you if the settings you have entered are suitable. If not, you can click the "Go Back" button to change them.


Keywords: publish, publishing, computer, local, intranet, dyndns, dynamic, dns, internal, network

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