Setting up your FTP Program - WS_FTP

The following explains how to set up WS_FTP to upload your files and how to use WS_FTP to change permissions on your files. This is based on one of our Unix servers. Windows will be slightly different - for example, changing permissions of files does not apply on the Windows servers.

These instructions are intended as a guide only. We have various different servers that will require various different setups - please refer to the instructions that were sent in the setup email that was sent to you for your particular circumstances.

WS_FTP can be downloaded from http://www.ipswitch.com.

In WS_FTP click the Connect button. This will open the Session Properties dialog box. Click the New button as below:

In Profile Name enter a name that you can easily remember - this can be anything.
In Host Name/Address type the FTP server address as per the setup email that WIS sent you, for example: www.yourdomain.co.uk. Be sure that this is the exact address as per your setup email.
In User ID type your username as per your setup email.
In Password type your password.
For example:

Then, depending on the server on which your site is hosted you may need to set the Remote Folder - check your setup email. If it says that your files need to be loaded in public_html or www follow this step.
Click the Startup tab and in Initial Remote Site Folder type: /web or /public_html or /www (as per your setup email) as below:

Please note that if your setup email says that you need to load web files into a specific folder (eg www or public_html) the above step is very important - otherwise your files will not be loaded into the correct location. If the setup email does not say that your files need to be loaded into a specific folder you can skip the above step and just go into the root directory.

Next click OK and the program should connect to your web site. The WS_FTP window should now look something like this:

The files on your local drive are on the left hand side and the web server is on the right hand side. Note that the location of the Remote Site in the top right hand window of this example is /web. It could be /public_html or /www

There are already directories and files loaded on the server in this case.

To upload a file click on it to select it (you can select several files at once by clicking on them whilst holding down the shift key or the control key) and then click the button in the centre with the right pointing arrow - an example screen is below.

Your main home page (index.htm or index.html) must go directly in the /web folder. If you do not do this your web site will not display properly. If you don't have an index page in your /web directory an error (Not authorised) will display on your web site. Similarly, in the example below, if we went to http://www.ourdomain.co.uk/help/ an error would be displayed because we have not yet uploaded an index page.

Setting permissions on scripts through WS_FTP

You can also set the permissions of a file through the FTP program (you don't need shell access to do this). If you have a CGI script with an extension .pl or .cgi you will need to set the permissions to "755".
To do this select the file on the web server and right click. Select chmod (UNIX) from the pop up menu.

The example below sets the permissions on email.shtml. Normally you would do this on a CGI script such as myscript.pl.

When you select chmod from the menu a further dialog box appears. If the file is a script ensure that the boxes are ticked as below - you should only do this for scripts ending in extensions .pl and .cgi. You should never click all the boxes - this will set the permissions to 777 which is prohibited on the server.

The above sets the permissions to 755 (read/write/execute, read/execute, read/execute).