html-dir-lists

Create bare-bones HTML pages to make your directories browsable.

This script, buildDirListings.sh, creates a bare-bones directory listing page for each of the children of the current directory. To avoid unintentionally exposing filepaths, the directory listing does not include a link to the parent, and it only creates pages for children, not grandchildren or great-grandchildren.

This script is idempotent, which means that you can run it repeatedly without changing the result. It also handles most special characters that might be in filenames.

Before using

Before running this script, consider using your server's built-in directory listing feature. On Apache, you can enable directory listing by adding Options +Indexes to the .htaccess file. If that's not an option for you (pun not intended), read on.

Demo

Imagine you have a directory - let's call it example - with some stuff in it. You want to be able to give someone a link to any of its subdirectories, like https://abc.com/example/exampleDir, which will let them browse the contents of that subdirectory.

First, go into the example directory:

cd example

Then, run the script:

bash ../buildDirListings.sh

Ta-da! Now there is an index.html page inside each of exampleDir and exampleDir2.

If you like, you can download this repository, delete the index.html files, and then run the commands above to re-create them.