humans.txt file basic tutorials with example

In this post, you’ll learn about the humans.txt file basic guide, How to create this file, and include or place it in your application with an example.

What is the humans.txt file?

It is a text file created by website developers to introduce their work.

This is a simple text file that has been saved in UTF-8 format.

It is beneficial to learn more about the people who are responsible for the website’s construction.

As you might be aware, robots.txt file is for search engines, while [humans.txt file](https://humanstxt.org/) is for people.

Humans.txt file contains the human’s meta information of website developers

Important points

  • This has recently been added as a de facto standard.
  • Creating this humans.txt file is not needed.
  • This file, like sitemaps, favicons, and robots.txt files, will be available in your application’s public root folder.
  • This file contains information about the developers, architects, content writers, DevOps information, etc in this file.
  • You wouldn’t have to hold to the same standard format; you can create something of your own.

Components of humans.txt file

This file includes the following entries for the people who are behind the website:

  • Authors information
  • social media profiles like Twitter, Facebook, GitHub, etc
  • contact email address or URLs
  • Location of authors
  • reference person
  • last updated date of a website
  • technologies used frameworks or software’s
  • Any other information to make it public
  • Does not add any value interims of SEO point of view

Sample standard humans.txt file

The sample text file content is shown below; it does not have to follow the same standard format; you can adjust the keys and values to fit your needs.

/* TEAM */
Developer: Name.
contact: [email protected] or contact form link.
Twitter: Twitter username.
Location: Seatle, USA

[...]

/* THANKS */
Name: reference name or url of the person
[...]

/* SITE */

Last update: 2020/04/22
Standards: HTML5, CSS3,javascript..
Components: Angular,Nodejs.
Software: MEAN Stack

How to use include humans.txt file in websites

This section solves Where to place the humans.txt file on the website?

First, upload the file to your web application’s root directory, and it will be accessible through your website at website.com/humans.txt. To upload this file, you’ll need read and write privileges.

Once the file is accessible through your website’s url, edit the HTML head section to add the link tag as shown below.

<link type="text/plain" rel="author" href="http://website/humans.txt" />

This way you can include humans.txt files in your application either with a web server root folder or code accessible through the root.

There are a lot of companies using the humans.txt file.

Google provided humans.txt file🔗 file with customized format.

Conclusion

TO sum up, the humans.txt file is for people, not for machines.

It is the simple and best way to include this file in your web application.