If you are starting out in the world of development, you may have come across a file index.html. If you don’t know very well what it is, in this post we will explain what it is for and how to create this kind of file

Index.html It is the default page within the server directories of any website which is loaded whenever a domain is requested and a specific file name is not specified.

In this case, the web server itself is the one in charge of searching for the file. index.html and show it to the visitor. The word index in HTML means index. If the meaning is combined with what web development would be, index in HTML It would be the main page or home of our website. Clearly, it is important to clarify that your main page can be called something else, since you can configure the server to search for another specific file by default.

Likewise, it is not necessary that the extension be Html, which is the most used extension on static sites. For example, if you program your website in PHP, it will be logical that you have a file index.php.

How to create an index.html file?

To create an index in Html you need to use a text editor or a development environment such as Visual Studio Code. Your HTML index page will have the same structure as pages created in HTML:

This is your index.html page

Here goes all your content from the initial page that you must load

This is the easiest way for you to create an index-html file from VS Code.

How to change the index.html?

As mentioned earlier, You may configure your server to load a page other than index.html by default.

The first thing you should do is create a file.htaccess to index in HTML in your directory to create a configuration, especially if you have shared hosting. The file .htaccess of index-HTML is placed in the root of the directory of our website, so to change the home page what you must do is add the following line:

DirectoryIndex my-index.html index.html index.php

With this line of code what you are ordering is that the default home page that should be shown to the end user is my-index.htmlin case, for some reason this page cannot be loaded, it will try index.html and if there are also problems loading this page, it will try once again showing index.php.

Where to continue?

Now that you know what it is for and how to create an index.html file in HTML, Do you want to continue acquiring knowledge in the area of ​​HTML index? With our Web Development Bootcamp you will be able to master this and other tools and technologies such as JavaScript, React, Microservices and even server deployment in less than 7 months. Sign up now!