iTP Secure WebServer System Administrator's Guide (iTPWebSvr 5.1+)

Configuring the iTP Secure WebServer
iTP Secure WebServer System Administrator’s Guide—522659-001
7-10
Mapping Requests to Contents
Mapping Requests to Contents
To make the contents on your server available to clients, you must map the object
information in URLs to the actual location of these objects on your server. To implement
this mapping, you specify one or more
Filemap directives in your server configuration
file (httpd.config).
Each
Filemap directive has two arguments, as follows:
Filemap url-prefix dir
where:
url-prefix
specifies the URL prefix to which this Filemap directive applies. For example:
/admin/widgets.
dir
is the server directory to which any object specification matching url-prefix will
be directed for the requested object.
The
Filemap directive converts a matched request specification (object path) into the
actual location on the server of the requested object by substituting the target server
directory (dir) for the matched URL prefix (url-prefix).
The
Filemap directive also has two options, both of which concern the handling of
symbolic links. For complete information on the use of the
Filemap directive, see
Filemap on page A-18.
To illustrate how the
Filemap directive works, assume the following Filemap
directive is specified in the configuration file of a server running on the host
www.widgets.com:
Filemap /admin /usr/tandem/webserver/root
If a web client user accesses this server by using the URL
http://www.widgets.com/admin/info/welcome.html
then the server maps the request to the following file on the server:
/usr/tandem/webserver/root/admin/info/welcome.html
You can add new content to your server without having to restart or reconfigure your
server. You simply place new files under one or more of the directories specified in
existing Filemap directives. As soon as you place these new files under a mapped
directory, users can begin accessing them.
For example, if you place a new file named
office.html in the directory
/usr/tandem/webserver/root
users can immediately begin accessing this new file by using the URL
http://www.widgets.com/admin/office.html