How to Change the Webroot of your Site

Our default webroot is named public. You cannot change the actual webroot, but you can symlink the default (forced) webroot to another folder. This has the same effect, without implications on the rest of our stack. A symlink works as an alias of the webroot. 

Steps in this guide include SSH commands. Here’s an article for you when you’re not familiar with how to log in using SSH.

How you can do it:

Time needed: 5 minutes

Symlink the public folder to the project’s public folder. You can do so with the following steps:

  1. Make the new folder

    Navigate to root and make the folder you want to symlink to. In this case, we want to make a new folder called newpublic that will be our new webroot:

    Navigate to the home directory of your site with:

    cd ~
    or
    cd $HOME

  2. Move to the correct folder

    Move the public folder to the new folder with:

    mv public newpublic

  3. Symlink new folder

    Symlink the new folder to act as your new webroot with this command:

    ln -s newpublic public

    The new public folder will look something like this: