Web solutions

If you want to run your own website, depending on your needs and purpose, there are several implementation options, an overview of which is presented here. For more information you can contact us at webmaster@fi.muni.cz.

Website on a separate domain

We typically allow for employee projects, labs, conferences and the like.

As far as the domain name is concerned, it is not a problem to arrange an address in the domain fi.muni.cz. In this case, however, the website needs to be hosted on either FI or MU infrastructure. It is also possible to have (also) an address outside the domain fi.muni.cz, but in this case the domain registration is not under the responsibility of CVT and the interested party is responsible for the organization and financial arrangements.

Hosting on your own server

If you already have your own physical server (typically in our datacenter), you will secure the webserver on your own and we will enable HTTP(S) access on the faculty firewall.

See also the Databases and Content Management Systems sections.

Hosting in the faculty cloud

You can use our cloud, where you create a virtual machine to which we assign a public address (we also prefer IPv6), mark it as production and allow access via HTTP(S). The management of the operating system and webserver and the obligation to keep it up to date, especially in terms of security, is again your responsibility.

See also the Databases and Content Management Systems sections.

GitLab Pages

If your site is static (not dynamically generated, i.e. does not require e.g. PHP or Django), you can use GitLab Pages - the site will be generated via GitLab CI based on data from the faculty GitLab repository and will typically be available at https://namespace.pages.fi.muni.cz/project/, where namespace is your faculty login or GitLab group name. The site can also be made available in parallel under a different (more representative) domain, see the section Web on a separate domain .

Hosting on the Aisa server

If it is a low-tech website (static pages or PHP, CGI) and you don't want to maintain an OS and webserver, you can use web hosting on an Aisa server using the Apache webserver. For this purpose we will assign you a directory under /webhost.

Here, you need to be careful about security - apply updates when deploying existing software and stick to secure design and defensive programming for custom solutions.

See also the Databases and Content Management Systems sections.

Content management systems

CVT does not currently provide a general purpose CMS as a service.

If you are considering deploying one of the CMS (Drupal, Joomla, Wordpress, ...) yourself, we strongly recommend that you keep it up-to-date and exercise caution when installing plugins, as it is a frequent target of security attacks (see also our blog post).

There is also the possibility to use the services of the Institute's web centre (specifically the page about the creation and operation of university websites), which provides the Umbraco content management system with the possibility to use the unified university design of the JVS.

Database

If a database is required, we recommend that you have a dedicated database created within one of the faculty-provided databases for reasons of efficiency and speed.

Web analytics

If you are interested in collecting analytical information about your visitors, you must consider privacy issues before deploying a solution (such as Google Analytics). In this case, we therefore strongly recommend considering a faculty instance of Matomo analytics.

The "official" web space under fi.muni.cz

We typically provide for conference, lab or project websites.

Web directory space

The most common case tends to be subject websites (e.g., https://www.fi.muni.cz/pb071/). In this case, we create a dedicated web directory under /www/ on Aise. This location is also available via NFS on Anxur from /net/aisa/html/. For more info, see the section Hosting on Aise .

Faculty wiki

Typically applicable to a program, department, lab, lab project, or conference website.

This option can be used if you have minimal site design requirements. The pages will be part of the official FI website (and its design). Ideally, they should fit into the official website and be linked to it in some (link) way. After consultation, editing rights can be assigned to a selected sub-tree of the site under https://www.fi.muni.cz/ via the faculty wiki.

The faculty wiki is an editorial system providing, among other things, versioning of pages, bilingualism (with automatic translation), identification of the responsible contact in the page footer for the subtree, and, under the direction of the FI webmasters, automatic link checking. Content can be inserted in either HTML or Markdown form, and images/files can be inserted using wiki files.

Representative redirection

If you already have a website or plan to host your site elsewhere, it is possible to provide a representative redirect https://www.fi.muni.cz/YOURPROJECT to your site.

We do not provide reverse proxy services (i.e., for example, projecting the content of https://somewhere.fi.muni.cz/project/PARAMETERS to https://www.fi.muni.cz/project/PARAMETERS).

Personal web space under fi.muni.cz

If you have a Unix account, you also have the option of producing personal web pages under https://www.fi.muni.cz/~xlogin/. In general, we allow you to run simple HTML pages, PHP-based pages (but you must specify shebang at the beginning of PHP scripts), or pages using CGI scripts.

If you intend to use a web framework, you must use CGI - we have a tutorial for Node.JS and with the help of flup it should also be possible to use Django. However, be aware that in this case your site must do without the need to modify the server configuration files (only configuration via .htaccess) can be used - i.e. you can use rewrite rules, for example, but you cannot use modules like mod_wsgi. In general, the framework cannot listen on a port by itself (i.e. we do not allow reverse proxy configuration), but it must be able to run via the CGI interface.

See the Web section of the technical information signpost for more detailed info on each option.

Web design

CVT does not currently provide design design services.

If you want to make a website on your own, an example of a usable framework with a reasonable default design is Bootstrap.

If you are interested in using the MU Unified Visual Style design kit, contact the CVT Web Center. There is also a JVS web template for labs.