Apache HTTP Server Version 2.0
Apache Module mod_autoindex
Description: | Generates directory indexes,
automatically, similar to the Unix ls command or the
Win32 dir shell command | Status: | Base | Module Identifier: | autoindex_module |
|
Summary
The index of a directory can come from one of two
sources:
- A file written by the user, typically called
index.html
. The DirectoryIndex
directive sets the
name of this file. This is controlled by
mod_dir
.
- Otherwise, a listing generated by the server. The other
directives control the format of this listing. The
AddIcon
, AddIconByEncoding
and
AddIconByType
are
used to set a list of icons to display for various file types;
for each file listed, the first icon listed that matches the
file is displayed. These are controlled by
mod_autoindex
.
The two functions are separated so that you can completely
remove (or replace) automatic index generation should you want
to.
Automatic index generation is enabled with using
Options +Indexes
. See the
Options
directive for
more details.
If the FancyIndexing
option is given with the IndexOptions
directive,
the column headers are links that control the order of the
display. If you select a header link, the listing will be
regenerated, sorted by the values in that column. Selecting the
same header repeatedly toggles between ascending and descending
order. These column header links are suppressed with
IndexOptions
directive's
SuppressColumnSorting
option.
Note that when the display is sorted by "Size", it's the
actual size of the files that's used, not the
displayed value - so a 1010-byte file will always be displayed
before a 1011-byte file (if in ascending order) even though
they both are shown as "1K".
Directives
Autoindex Request Query Arguments
Apache 2.0.23 reorganized the Query Arguments for Column
Sorting, and introduced an entire group of new query options.
To effectively eliminate all client control over the output,
the IndexOptions
IgnoreClient
option was introduced.
The column sorting headers themselves are self-referencing
hyperlinks that add the sort query options shown below. Any
option below may be added to any request for the directory
resource.
C=N
sorts the directory by file name
C=M
sorts the directory by last-modified
date, then file name
C=S
sorts the directory by size, then file
name
C=D
sorts the directory by description, then
file name
O=A
sorts the listing in Ascending
Order
O=D
sorts the listing in Descending
Order
F=0
formats the listing as a simple list
(not FancyIndexed)
F=1
formats the listing as a FancyIndexed
list
F=2
formats the listing as an HTMLTable
FancyIndexed list
V=0
disables version sorting
V=1
enables version sorting
P=pattern
lists only files matching
the given pattern
Note that the 'P'attern query argument is tested
after the usual IndexIgnore directives are processed,
and all file names are still subjected to the same criteria as
any other autoindex listing. The Query Arguments parser in
mod_autoindex will stop abruptly when an unrecognized option is
encountered. The Query Arguments must be well formed, according
to the table above.
The simple example below, which can be clipped and saved in
a header.html file, illustrates these query options. Note that
the unknown "X" argument, for the submit button, is listed last
to assure the arguments are all parsed before mod_autoindex
encounters the X=Go input.
<FORM METHOD="GET">
Show me a <SELECT NAME="F">
<OPTION VALUE="0"> Plain list
<OPTION VALUE="1" SELECTED> Fancy list
<OPTION VALUE="2"> Table list
</SELECT>
Sorted by <SELECT NAME="C">
<OPTION VALUE="N" SELECTED> Name
<OPTION VALUE="M"> Date Modified
<OPTION VALUE="S"> Size
<OPTION VALUE="D"> Description
</SELECT>
<SELECT NAME="O">
<OPTION VALUE="A" SELECTED> Ascending
<OPTION VALUE="D"> Descending
</SELECT>
<SELECT NAME="V">
<OPTION VALUE="0" SELECTED> in Normal order
<OPTION VALUE="1"> in Version order
</SELECT>
Matching <INPUT TYPE="text" NAME="P" VALUE="*">
<INPUT TYPE="submit" NAME="X" VALUE="Go">
</FORM>
|
Description: | Alternate text to display for a file, instead of an
icon selected by filename | Syntax: | AddAlt string file [file] ... | Context: | server config, virtual host, directory, .htaccess | Override: | Indexes | Status: | Base | Module: | mod_autoindex |
|
AddAlt
provides the alternate text to
display for a file, instead of an icon, for FancyIndexing
.
File is a file extension, partial filename, wild-card
expression or full filename for files to describe.
String is enclosed in double quotes ("
).
This alternate text is displayed if the client is image-incapable,
has image loading disabled, or fails to retrieve the icon.
Examples:
AddAlt "PDF" *.pdf
AddAlt "Compressed" *.gz *.zip *.Z
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Description: | Alternate text to display for a file instead of an icon
selected by MIME-encoding | Syntax: | AddAltByEncoding string MIME-encoding
[MIME-encoding] ... | Context: | server config, virtual host, directory, .htaccess | Override: | Indexes | Status: | Base | Module: | mod_autoindex |
|
AddAltByEncoding
provides the alternate
text to display for a file, instead of an icon, for FancyIndexing
.
MIME-encoding is a valid content-encoding, such as
x-compress
. String is enclosed in double
quotes ("
). This alternate text is displayed if the
client is image-incapable, has image loading disabled, or fails to
retrieve the icon.
Example:
AddAltByEncoding "gzip" x-gzip
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Description: | Alternate text to display for a file, instead of an
icon selected by MIME content-type | Syntax: | AddAltByType string
MIME-type [MIME-type] ... | Context: | server config, virtual host, directory, .htaccess | Override: | Indexes | Status: | Base | Module: | mod_autoindex |
|
AddAltByType
sets the alternate text to
display for a file, instead of an icon, for FancyIndexing
.
MIME-type is a valid content-type, such as
text/html
. String is enclosed in double
quotes ("
). This alternate text is displayed if the
client is image-incapable, has image loading disabled, or fails to
retrieve the icon.
Example:
AddAltByType "TXT" text/plain
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Description: | Description to display for a file | Syntax: | AddDescription
string file [file] ... | Context: | server config, virtual host, directory, .htaccess | Override: | Indexes | Status: | Base | Module: | mod_autoindex |
|
This sets the description to display for a file, for
FancyIndexing
.
File is a file extension, partial filename, wild-card
expression or full filename for files to describe.
String is enclosed in double quotes ("
).
Example:
AddDescription "The planet Mars"
/web/pics/mars.gif |
The typical, default description field is 23 bytes wide. 6
more bytes are added by the
IndexOptions SuppressIcon
option, 7 bytes are
added by the IndexOptions SuppressSize
option, and 19 bytes are added by the
IndexOptions SuppressLastModified
option.
Therefore, the widest default the description column is ever
assigned is 55 bytes.
See the DescriptionWidth
IndexOptions
keyword
for details on overriding the size of this column, or allowing
descriptions of unlimited length.
Caution Descriptive text defined with
AddDescription may contain HTML markup, such as
tags and character entities. If the width of the description
column should happen to truncate a tagged element (such as
cutting off the end of a bolded phrase), the results may
affect the rest of the directory listing.
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Description: | Icon to display for a file selected by name | Syntax: | AddIcon icon
name [name] ... | Context: | server config, virtual host, directory, .htaccess | Override: | Indexes | Status: | Base | Module: | mod_autoindex |
|
This sets the icon to display next to a file ending in
name for FancyIndexing
.
Icon is either a (%-escaped) relative URL to the icon,
or of the format (alttext,url) where
alttext is the text tag given for an icon for
non-graphical browsers.
Name is either ^^DIRECTORY^^ for directories,
^^BLANKICON^^ for blank lines (to format the list correctly), a
file extension, a wildcard expression, a partial filename or a
complete filename. Examples:
AddIcon (IMG,/icons/image.xbm) .gif .jpg .xbm
AddIcon /icons/dir.xbm ^^DIRECTORY^^
AddIcon /icons/backup.xbm *~
|
AddIconByType
should be used in preference to AddIcon
,
when possible.
Description: | Icon to display next to files selected by MIME
content-encoding | Syntax: | AddIconByEncoding
icon MIME-encoding [MIME-encoding] ... | Context: | server config, virtual host, directory, .htaccess | Override: | Indexes | Status: | Base | Module: | mod_autoindex |
|
This sets the icon to display next to files with FancyIndexing
.
Icon is either a (%-escaped) relative URL to the icon,
or of the format (alttext,url) where
alttext is the text tag given for an icon for
non-graphical browsers.
Mime-encoding is a wildcard expression matching
required the content-encoding. Examples:
AddIconByEncoding /icons/compress.xbm x-compress |
Description: | Icon to display next to files selected by MIME
content-type | Syntax: | AddIconByType
icon MIME-type [MIME-type] ... | Context: | server config, virtual host, directory, .htaccess | Override: | Indexes | Status: | Base | Module: | mod_autoindex |
|
This sets the icon to display next to files of type
MIME-type for FancyIndexing
.
Icon is either a (%-escaped) relative URL to the icon,
or of the format (alttext,url) where
alttext is the text tag given for an icon for
non-graphical browsers.
Mime-type is a wildcard expression matching
required the mime types. Examples:
AddIconByType (IMG,/icons/image.xbm) image/* |
Description: | Icon to display for files when no specific icon is
configured | Syntax: | DefaultIcon url-path | Context: | server config, virtual host, directory, .htaccess | Override: | Indexes | Status: | Base | Module: | mod_autoindex |
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The DefaultIcon
directive sets the icon
to display for files when no specific icon is known, for FancyIndexing
.
Url-path is a (%-escaped) relative URL to the icon.
Examples:
DefaultIcon /icon/unknown.xbm |
Description: | Name of the file that will be inserted at the top
of the index listing | Syntax: | HeaderName filename | Context: | server config, virtual host, directory, .htaccess | Override: | Indexes | Status: | Base | Module: | mod_autoindex |
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The HeaderName
directive sets the name
of the file that will be inserted at the top of the index
listing. Filename is the name of the file to include.
Example
HeaderName HEADER.html
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Both HeaderName and ReadmeName now treat
Filename as a URI path relative to the one used to
access the directory being indexed. Filename must
resolve to a document with a major content type of
"text/* " (e.g., text/html ,
text/plain , etc.). This means that
filename may refer to a CGI script if the script's
actual file type (as opposed to its output) is marked as
text/html such as with a directive like:
Content negotiation
will be performed if the MultiViews Option is enabled. If
filename resolves to a static text/html
document (not a CGI script) and the Includes
option is enabled, the file
will be processed for server-side includes (see the
mod_include documentation).
|
If the file specified by HeaderName
contains
the beginnings of an HTML document (<HTML>, <HEAD>,
etc) then you will probably want to set IndexOptions
+SuppressHTMLPreamble
, so that these tags are not
repeated.
Description: | Adds to the list of files to hide when listing
a directory | Syntax: | IndexIgnore file [file] ... | Context: | server config, virtual host, directory, .htaccess | Override: | Indexes | Status: | Base | Module: | mod_autoindex |
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The IndexIgnore
directive adds to the
list of files to hide when listing a directory. File is a
file extension, partial filename, wildcard expression or full
filename for files to ignore. Multiple IndexIgnore directives add
to the list, rather than the replacing the list of ignored
files. By default, the list contains
`.
'. Example:
IndexIgnore README .htaccess *~ |
Description: | Various configuration settings for directory
indexing | Syntax: | IndexOptions [+|-]option [[+|-]option] ... | Context: | server config, virtual host, directory, .htaccess | Override: | Indexes | Status: | Base | Module: | mod_autoindex |
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The IndexOptions
directive specifies the
behavior of the directory indexing. Option can be one
of
- DescriptionWidth=[n
| *] (Apache 1.3.10 or 2.0.23 and later)
- The
DescriptionWidth
keyword allows you to
specify the width of the description column in
characters.
-DescriptionWidth
(or unset) allows
mod_autoindex to calculate the best width.
DescriptionWidth=n
fixes the column width to
n bytes wide.
DescriptionWidth=*
grows the column to the
width necessary to accommodate the longest description
string.
- See the section on
AddDescription
for dangers
inherent in truncating descriptions.
- FancyIndexing
-
This turns on fancy indexing of directories.
- FoldersFirst (Apache
1.3.10 or 2.0.23 and later)
- If this option is enabled, subdirectory listings will
always appear first, followed by normal files in the
directory. The listing is basically broken into two
components, the files and the subdirectories, and each is
sorted separately and then displayed subdirectories-first.
For instance, if the sort order is descending by name, and
FoldersFirst
is enabled, subdirectory
Zed
will be listed before subdirectory
Beta
, which will be listed before normal files
Gamma
and Alpha
. This option
only has an effect if FancyIndexing
is also enabled.
- HTMLTable (Experimental,
Apache 2.0.23 and later)
-
This experimental option with FancyIndexing constructs a
simple table for the fancy directory listing. Note this will
confuse older browsers. It is particularly necessary if file
names or description text will alternate between
left-to-right and right-to-left reading order, as can happen
on WinNT or other utf-8 enabled platforms.
- IconsAreLinks
-
This makes the icons part of the anchor for the filename, for
fancy indexing.
- IconHeight[=pixels]
(Apache 1.3 and later)
-
Presence of this option, when used with IconWidth, will cause
the server to include
HEIGHT
and
WIDTH
attributes in the IMG
tag for
the file icon. This allows browser to precalculate the page
layout without having to wait until all the images have been
loaded. If no value is given for the option, it defaults to
the standard height of the icons supplied with the Apache
software.
- IconWidth[=pixels] (Apache
1.3 and later)
-
Presence of this option, when used with IconHeight, will
cause the server to include
HEIGHT
and
WIDTH
attributes in the IMG
tag for
the file icon. This allows browser to precalculate the page
layout without having to wait until all the images have been
loaded. If no value is given for the option, it defaults to
the standard width of the icons supplied with the Apache
software.
- IgnoreClient
-
This option causes mod_autoindex to ignore all query
variables from the client, including sort order (implies
SuppressColumnSorting
.)
- NameWidth=[n | *]
(Apache 1.3.2 and later)
- The NameWidth keyword allows you to specify the width of
the filename column in bytes.
-NameWidth
(or unset) allows mod_autoindex
to calculate the best width.
NameWidth=n
fixes the column width to n
bytes wide.
NameWidth=*
grows the column to the
necessary width.
- ScanHTMLTitles
-
This enables the extraction of the title from HTML documents
for fancy indexing. If the file does not have a description
given by AddDescription then
httpd will read the document for the value of the TITLE tag.
This is CPU and disk intensive.
- SuppressColumnSorting
(Apache 1.3 and later)
-
If specified, Apache will not make the column headings in a
FancyIndexed directory listing into links for sorting. The
default behavior is for them to be links; selecting the
column heading will sort the directory listing by the values
in that column. Prior to Apache 2.0.23, this also
disabled parsing the Query Arguments for the sort
string. That behavior is now controlled by IndexOptions
IgnoreClient in Apache 2.0.23.
- SuppressDescription
-
This will suppress the file description in fancy indexing
listings. By default, no file descriptions are defined, and
so the use of this option will regain 23 characters of screen
space to use for something else. See
AddDescription
for
information about setting the file description. See also the
DescriptionWidth
index option to limit the size of the description
column.
- SuppressHTMLPreamble
(Apache 1.3 and later)
-
If the directory actually contains a file specified by the
HeaderName
directive, the module usually includes the contents of the file
after a standard HTML preamble (<HTML>, <HEAD>,
et cetera). The SuppressHTMLPreamble option disables
this behaviour, causing the module to start the display with the
header file contents. The header file must contain appropriate
HTML instructions in this case. If there is no header file, the
preamble is generated as usual.
- SuppressIcon (Apache
2.0.23 and later)
-
This will suppress the icon in fancy indexing listings.
Combining both SuppressIcon and
SuppressRules yields proper HTML 3.2 output, which
by the final specification prohibits IMG and HR tags from the
PRE block (used to format FancyIndexed listings.)
- SuppressLastModified
-
This will suppress the display of the last modification date,
in fancy indexing listings.
- SuppressRules
(Apache 2.0.23 and later)
-
This will suppress the horizontal rule lines (HR tags) in
directory listings. Combining both SuppressIcon and
SuppressRules yeilds proper HTML 3.2 output, which
by the final specification prohibits IMG and HR tags from the
PRE block (used to format FancyIndexed listings.)
- SuppressSize
-
This will suppress the file size in fancy indexing
listings.
- TrackModified (Apache
1.3.15 or 2.0.23 and later)
-
This returns the Last-Modified and ETag values for the listed
directory in the HTTP header. It is only valid if the
operating system and file system return appropriate stat()
results. Some Unix systems do so, as do OS2's JFS and Win32's
NTFS volumes. OS2 and Win32 FAT volumes, for example, do not.
Once this feature is enabled, the client or proxy can track
changes to the list of files when they perform a HEAD
request. Note some operating systems correctly track new and
removed files, but do not track changes for sizes or dates of
the files within the directory. Changes to the size
or date stamp of an existing file will not update the
Last-Modified header on all Unix platforms. If this
is a concern, leave this option disabled.
- VersionSort (Apache 2.0a3
and later)
-
The VersionSort keyword causes files containing version
numbers to sort in a natural way. Strings are sorted as
usual, except that substrings of digits in the name and
description are compared according to their numeric value.
For example:
foo-1.7
foo-1.7.2
foo-1.7.12
foo-1.8.2
foo-1.8.2a
foo-1.12
|
If the number starts with a zero, then it is considered to
be a fraction:
foo-1.001
foo-1.002
foo-1.030
foo-1.04
|
-
Incremental IndexOptions
-
Apache 1.3.3 introduced some significant changes in the
handling of
IndexOptions
directives. In
particular,
- Multiple
IndexOptions
directives for a
single directory are now merged together. The result of
the example above will now be the equivalent of
IndexOptions FancyIndexing ScanHTMLTitles
.
- The addition of the incremental syntax
(i.e., prefixing keywords with '+' or '-').
Whenever a '+' or '-' prefixed keyword is encountered, it
is applied to the current IndexOptions
settings (which may have been inherited from an upper-level
directory). However, whenever an unprefixed keyword is
processed, it clears all inherited options and any
incremental settings encountered so far. Consider the
following example:
IndexOptions +ScanHTMLTitles -IconsAreLinks
FancyIndexing
IndexOptions +SuppressSize
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The net effect is equivalent to
IndexOptions FancyIndexing +SuppressSize
,
because the unprefixed FancyIndexing
discarded
the incremental keywords before it, but allowed them to
start accumulating again afterward.
To unconditionally set the IndexOptions
for a
particular directory, clearing the inherited settings,
specify keywords without any '+' or '-' prefixes.
Description: | Sets the default ordering of the directory index | Syntax: | IndexOrderDefault
Ascending|Descending Name|Date|Size|Description | Context: | server config, virtual host, directory, .htaccess | Override: | Indexes | Status: | Base | Module: | mod_autoindex |
|
The IndexOrderDefault
directive is used
in combination with the FancyIndexing
index option. By default, fancyindexed directory listings are
displayed in ascending order by filename; the
IndexOrderDefault
allows you to change this initial
display order.
IndexOrderDefault
takes two
arguments. The first must be either Ascending
or
Descending
, indicating the direction of the sort.
The second argument must be one of the keywords Name
,
Date
, Size
, or Description
,
and identifies the primary key. The secondary key is
always the ascending filename.
You can force a directory listing to only be displayed in a
particular order by combining this directive with the SuppressColumnSorting
index option; this will prevent the client from requesting the
directory listing in a different order.
Description: | Name of the file that will be inserted at the end
of the index listing | Syntax: | ReadmeName filename | Context: | server config, virtual host, directory, .htaccess | Override: | Indexes | Status: | Base | Module: | mod_autoindex |
|
The ReadmeName
directive sets the name
of the file that will be appended to the end of the index
listing. Filename is the name of the file to include, and
is taken to be relative to the location being indexed.
Example
ReadmeName FOOTER.html
|
See also HeaderName
, where this behavior
is described in greater detail.