Apache Module mod_dir
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. This is
provided by
mod_autoindex.
The two functions are separated so that you can completely
remove (or replace) automatic index generation should you want
to.
A "trailing slash" redirect is issued when the server
receives a request for a URL
http://servername/foo/dirname where
dirname is a directory. Directories require a
trailing slash, so mod_dir issues a redirect to
http://servername/foo/dirname/.
The DirectoryIndex directive sets the
list of resources to look for, when the client requests an index
of the directory by specifying a / at the end of the directory
name. Local-url is the (%-encoded) URL of a document on
the server relative to the requested directory; it is usually the
name of a file in the directory. Several URLs may be given, in
which case the server will return the first one that it finds. If
none of the resources exist and the Indexes option is
set, the server will generate its own listing of the
directory.
Example
DirectoryIndex index.html
then a request for http://myserver/docs/ would
return http://myserver/docs/index.html if it
exists, or would list the directory if it did not.
Note that the documents do not need to be relative to the
directory;
DirectoryIndex index.html index.txt /cgi-bin/index.pl
would cause the CGI script /cgi-bin/index.pl to be
executed if neither index.html or index.txt
existed in a directory.
The DirectorySlash directive determines, whether
mod_dir should fixup URLs pointing to a directory or
not.
Typically if a user requests a resource without a trailing slash, which
points to a directory, mod_dir redirects him to the same
resource, but with trailing slash for some good reasons:
- The user is finally requesting the canonical URL of the resource
mod_autoindex works correctly. Since it doesn't emit
the path in the link, it would point to the wrong path.DirectoryIndex will be evaluated
only for directories requested with trailing slash.- Relative URL references inside html pages will work correctly.
Well, if you don't want this effect and the reasons above don't
apply to you, you can turn off the redirect with:
# see security warning below!
<Location /some/path>
DirectorySlash Off
SetHandler some-handler
</Location>
Security Warning
Turning off the trailing slash redirect may result in an information
disclosure. Consider a situation where mod_autoindex is
active (Options +Indexes) and DirectoryIndex is set to a valid resource (say,
index.html) and there's no other special handler defined for
that URL. In this case a request with a trailing slash would show the
index.html file. But a request without trailing slash
would list the directory contents.
