What is meant by the term "web root"?

Question

I have set up my own AMP stack on my local machine and am playing around with web application development. I am researching about various best practices is secure application development, and I see constant references to the term "web root"

For example:

Make sure you store the file outside of the web root

I more or less understand, however, I am slightly confused. Consider the WebServer directory in OS X:

/Library
|
|--WebServer
   |
   |--CGI-Executables
   |
   |--share
   |
   |--Documents
      |--index.html.en
      |--MyWebApp
         |
         |--myFile1.html
         |--myFile2.js
         |--myFile3.php

The term seems to suggest that the web root is at the MyWebApp directory. However, wouldn't anything under 'Documents' be visible, or even anything under WebServer. Maybe not, because when I remove index.html.en and navigate to localhost/ in my browser, I get a 403 error.

What is meant by the "web root"?

Answer 1

Web root is the first directory can be accesible by the web. Usually is called /public_html. You can define directories at the same level or upper with data that is used in your website (e.g. images, cache memory...).