How to upload your web stories to a server

So, now that you have finished building your story, it's time to publish them. There are various ways to publish your web story. One of them is to upload your web story to your server. We will call this option, export to zip for now. 

This is a simple 3 step process as follows 

Step 1 - Click Publish Button and hit the export to zip 

The following video shows you how to export the zip file that contains all the assets. When you click export to zip, it will ask you for 2 things 

1. Track analytics - If you wish MakeStories to track the analytics for you, check this box
2. Canonical URL - This is basically the URL where you will be hosting your story. So, suppose, you are hosting the story at https://mydomain.com/story-folder then add the same in the textbox under title "Canonical URL".

The video below explains the same. 

Step 2 - Download the zip files and unzip them

When the zip file has been created and is ready for export, you will get a prompt asking you to download the files. If you choose to not wait for the download prompt, don't worry, you will also get an email with a download link. P.S. download time may vary depending on the number of assets you use. So, please be patient and avoid hitting the download zip file multiple times as that won't help. Once you download, you will see that you get a zip file. Unzip the file and when you do so, you will get a folder with the following structure 

1. Your_story_name [ Main Folder ]
   • assets [ This is where all your story assets like images, videos, svg files stay ]
   • bookend.json [ This file contains all the configuration for your bookend that appears at the end of the story ]
   • index.html [ this it the main story file that has all the code and this is highly optimized ]
   • unminified.html [ You don't need to worry about this unless and until you want to check the code ]

Step 3 - Connect to FTP Server and upload the files

Now, that you have downloaded all your files, the last step is to upload the files to your web server. For this, you will need an FTP connection details. You can ask your hosting company for one or you can ask your server administrator if you have one in-house. If you use cPanel or Plesk server and manage the whole server on your own, following are the links that will help you understand how to create FTP user for your server

How to create FTP Account / User in cPanel

How to create FTP Account / User in Plesk

If you are using the NGINX server on your own VPS using Digital Ocean / Vultr, then the FTP details will be the same as your SSH details. These are the most popular server setups. If you have anything else and cannot figure out, we recommend reaching out to your hosting company to resolve it. 

The most important thing to figure out is to know where your public-facing directory is in the server. If you are using cPanel, you will have to upload your story files to "public_html" directory . If you are using a Plesk panel, you will have to upload your story files to "httpdocs" directory. 

If you are using an NGINX server, one of the following will be your public-facing directory 

1. /var/www/html

2. /usr/nginx/share/nginx/html 

Now, that you have figured out the FTP details and the public-facing directory, the only part you have to do is upload the files and folders using a nice FTP client. I personally use FileZilla and you can download it from https://filezilla-project.org/ . Once downloaded, do the following 

1. Connect the FTP and open your public-facing directory

2. Create a directory that you want to upload the story to. Suppose you want your URL to look like https://mydomain.com/storyurl, create a directory named "storyurl"

3.  Now, navigate to that directory and drag drop the folders and files

Check the video below to understand how to do this. 

I hope this article covers everything and helps you understand the upload process.