How can I create a simple index.html file which li

Question

We use a web server that does not allow directory listing.

There is a specific directory I would like to allow listing of.

How can make a simple HTML file that will contain the contents of this directory?

Answer 1

You can either: Write a server-side script page like PHP, JSP, ASP.net etc to generate this HTML dynamically

or

Setup the web-server that you are using (e.g. Apache) to do exactly that automatically for directories that doesn't contain welcome-page (e.g. index.html)

Specifically in apache read more here: Edit the httpd.conf: http://justlinux.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&postid=502789#post502789

or add the autoindex mod: http://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/mod/mod_autoindex.html

Answer 2

Did you try to allow it for this directory via .htaccess?

Options +Indexes

I use this for some of my directories where directory listing is disabled by my provider

Answer 3

For me PHP is the easiest way to do it:

<?php
echo "Here are our files";
$path = ".";
$dh = opendir($path);
$i=1;
while (($file = readdir($dh)) !== false) {
    if($file != "." && $file != ".." && $file != "index.php" && $file != ".htaccess" && $file != "error_log" && $file != "cgi-bin") {
        echo "<a href='$path/$file'>$file</a><br /><br />";
        $i++;
    }
}
closedir($dh);
?> 

Place this in your directory and set where you want it to search on the $path. The first if statement will hide your php file and .htaccess and the error log. It will then display the output with a link. This is very simple code and easy to edit.

Answer 4

There are enough valid reasons to explicitly disable automatic directory indexes in apache or other web servers. Or, for example, you might want to only include certain file types in the index. In such cases you might still want to have a statically generated index.html file for specific folders.

This can be easily achieved with tree - a minimalistic utility that is available on most unix-like systems (ubuntu/debian: sudo apt install tree, mac: brew install tree) and which can generate plain text, XML, JSON or HTML output.

Generate an HTML directory index one level deep:

tree -H '.' -L 1 --noreport --charset utf-8 > index.html

Only include specific file types that match a glob pattern, e.g. *.zip files:

tree -H '.' -L 1 --noreport --charset utf-8 -P "*.zip" > index.html

^{The argument to -H is what will be used as a base href, so you can pass either a relative path such as . or an absolute path from the web root, such as /files. -L 1 limits the listing to the current directory only.}

I wanted an index generator which I could style the way I wanted, so ended up using this script — in addition to having customizable styling, the script will also recursively generate the index.html file in all the nested subdirectories.

Answer 5

If you have a staging server that has directory listing enabled, then you can copy the index.html to the production server.

For example:

wget https://staging/dir/index.html

# do any additional processing on index.html

scp index.html prod/dir

Answer 6

This can't be done with pure HTML.

However if you have access to PHP on the Apache server (you tagged the post "apache") it can be done easilly - se the PHP glob function. If not - you might try Server Side Include - it's an Apache thing, and I don't know much about it.