Customizing Apache Directory Listings with .htaccess

I was clearing off my desk today when I found an article I've been meaning to scan and send to somebody -- the story of how my friends almost elected a dalmatian and squirrel to the homecoming court of the University of North Texas in 1989. The alumni magazine wrote a feature on Hector the Eagle Dog and Agnes the Squirrel's campaign, which attracted national media and made a few of the human homecoming candidates very angry.

I can never tell when a file's too big to send in email without aggravating the recipient, so I upload files to my server and email the links instead. I decided to make this process easier by creating a clippings directory where uploaded files show up automatically.

The Apache web server can publish a listing of all files in a directory, as the official Apache site does in its images subdirectory. I wanted to make my clippings page look more like the rest of my weblog, so I found a tutorial on customizing directory listing pages.

First, I created an .htaccess file in the directory and turned directory indexing on with this command:

Options +Indexes

This command only works on servers that are configured to allow users to change options. For security reasons, I turn directory listings off by default, so they only appear when I specifically configure a directory to reveal its contents.

Next, I created header and footer web pages that contain the HTML markup to display above and below the directory listing. These files are identified by two more commands in .htaccess:

HeaderName header.html
ReadmeName footer.html

These web pages are located in the clippings directory. For the final step, I added a description of PDF documents and made sure that the header and footer files are not included in the listing:

AddDescription "PDF Document" .pdf
IndexIgnore header.html footer.html

There's a lot more that can be customized in an Apache directory listing, as the tutorial demonstrates, but for my project it seemed like overkill.

Update: Alternatively, I could've checked to see if the story was already online. Auugh.

Publishing · Programming · 2008/11/26 · 1 COMMENT · Link

Comments

If you aren't familiar with HTML, there's another much easier and simpler way to send large files. Just go to 2large2email (www.2large2email.com), they're got options to send large files of up to 2gb in size via the internet.

#1 · Prasad · 2008/11/30