Simple Bash Script For File Managment on Apache Web Server

Author: Baden

May 5, 2023

Recently, I made this website you're looking at now. When creating this website, I learned that in order to make my html visible to the outside world I needed a web server. I went with Apache just because I am not familiar with it as much as IIS Servers (Window’s web server). I thought it would be a good thing to push me out of my comfort zone.

When making an Apache Web Server you have to put your front-end assets (your HTML, CSS or images) in a specific place, so when someone looks up your website’s domain, it can find the corresponding html to display on the web browser. In this case Apache wants you to put assets in a folder called /var/www/html. Simple enough, right? Well I found out pretty quickly this was not the case.

Because I am using an Ubuntu machine hosted by Google Cloud, I have to upload my files to the home directory via SSH. That’s fine and good and all but with all of the files all piled up on the home drive, I would have to manually use sudo mv index.html /var/www/html for each asset to get it where I wanted it to be. Well, if you only have one or two assets, that’s fine, but I have loads of assets! And I am a programmer, and we are a lazy people!

That is when I remembered a course at school I took called Linux Scripting. This course taught us the basics of scripting on a Linux machine, using Bash, Korn Shell, and others. I knew I could make this job a lot easier on my lazy mind by incorporating a script.

What is a script, you may be asking? A script can be compared to a movie script, but instead of actors following the script your computer acts out the script. So that means the computer runs line by line down the script doing exactly what is asked of it. So, I quickly opened up VS Code and whipped up a Bash Script for my computer to follow. And it looked a little something like this:


#!/bin/bash

# move to the current directory
cd "$(dirname "$0")"

# loop through all files in the directory
for file in *; do
  # check if the file is not the script itself and is a regular file
  if [[ "$file" != "$(basename "$0")" && -f "$file" ]]; then
    # check if the file has .png, .jpg, or .svg extension
    if [[ "$file" =~ \.(png|jpg|svg)$ ]]; then
      # move the file to /var/www/html/images
      sudo mv "$file" /var/www/html/images/
    else
      # move the file to /var/www/html
      sudo mv "$file" /var/www/html/
    fi
  fi
done

Don't get overwhelmed here, I know programming can look a little scary to the untrained eye but look at it like a computer would, line by line.

This script is very simple, it grabs all of the files in the current directory, in this case, the home directory. After which it then loops through the file to see if it not the script itself (I don’t want the script to move itself, that would be bad lol) and then checks to see if the file is an image. If the file is not an image it just goes straight to the /var/www/html directory and if it is an image it goes to a different directory here: /var/www/html/images, just for the sake of my organization.

In conclusion, sometimes it pays to be lazy! This was definitely a learning point for me. I love being able to find a problem or inconvenience and be able to solve it on my own with programming.