[Jmol-users] Mavericks Local Server

[Philip B. <pb...@sa...>]

This is primarily addressed to newer jmol Mac users.  For a long time Apple provided a "web Sharing" option in the Sharing control panel.  That disappeared a couple of OSX iterations ago.  This allowed you to use the Sites directory in your home account as a local network server.

This is handy since it allows you to drag and drop your web pages into the Sites directory during development and serve them from there.   If your public server is like ours, uploads can take a long time; this is instantaneous  Furthermore, you can test your site with a variety of devices you may have on your local network: my wife’s Windows machine, my iMac (on which the server is located) and MacBook Pro, and my iOS devices, for example.  It also by-passes the problem of trying to launch the Java applets from your desktop.  That is, it works just like your external public server.

It also provides a way to serve your site locally when giving a talk.

Most of you longtime Mac users already know all this.  But, after having done it a number of years ago when Apple told you how to do it,  I went through the process of setting it up under Mavericks where the web serving option is no longer presented.  The following document is the best I found for a step-by-step how to:

	https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-3083

I would add only a couple additional points.  If, when you get it all set up, you have permissions errors trying to access the site, check the permissions settings on your home directory and the Sites directory.  Everyone must have read access for this to work.

The local host name of your new website is: YourMachineName.local. (I have a very complex machine name which is a pain to type in every time I want to access the site.) In the sharing panel, you can change that in the edit option without changing your machine name.  a.local works just fine.

If you do not want to go to Terminal to turn off and on the apache server, the following link gives you a preference pane for doing so.

http://clickontyler.com/web-sharing/

Phil

Philip Bays
Emeritus Professor of Chemistry
Saint Mary's College
Notre Dame, IN 46556
pb...@sa...