What the .well-known Folder is Used for (2024)

Inside your ~/public folder, you might find a .well-known directory. This is a directory commonly used as a web-based protocol to fetch your “site-wide metadata” about a host before making a request. If you don’t see that folder that doesn’t mean something is wrong, it just means it hasn’t been used or created yet. All of our automated procedures that rely on this will create it automatically if it’s not there.

If for some reason you’ll need to create this folder, you can take the following steps.

Create the folder using SSH

With SSH you can simply issue the following command after being logged in:

mkdir ~/public/.well-known

Create the folder using SFTP

With SFTP you can usually right-click within your SFTP application on the parent directory being ~/public in this instance. Choose “Create directory” and name the new directory .well-known