☩ Walking in Light with Christ – Faith, Computing, Diary

I have configured Apache VirtualHost, inside the VirtualHost hosted domain, it is supposed to be a directory, where Directory Listing has to be allowed. My VirtualHost configuration looks like so:


NameVirtualHost *

ServerAdmin my-email@domain-name.com
ServerName www.pc-freak.net
ServerAlias www.domain-name.com domain-name.com
DocumentRoot /var/www
DirectoryIndex index.html index.htm index.php index.html.var

Options FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride All
Order allow,deny
allow from all


Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
AllowOverride All
Order allow,deny
allow from all


Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
AllowOverride All
Order allow,deny
allow from all

ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ /usr/lib/cgi-bin/

AllowOverride None
Options +ExecCGI -MultiViews +SymLinksIfOwnerMatch
Order allow,deny
Allow from all

ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log
LogLevel warn
CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined


I have a directory (/var/www/directory), there I store various files and I prefer this directory to be enabled to support Directory listing. I have the whole situation on Debian Linux. By default in Debian Apache is configured to disable directory listing for subdirectories to both default host and Virtualhosts …

In order to enable /var/www/directory, accessed inside browser via web address http://wwww.domain-name.com/directory/ I had to add inside my Virtualhost /etc/apache2/sites-available/domain-name.com following Apache directive:



AddDefaultCharset UTF-8
Options FollowSymLinks Indexes
AllowOverride All



As you can see I included also AddDefaultCharset UTF-8, because inside /directory I have files in cyrillic and, if I don’t explicitly set the encoding to UTF-8, the htmls are improperly shown in browsers.

The exact directive that enables directory listing in Apache is:


Options Indexes


Setting Indexes to -Indexes disables directory listing, e.g.



Options -Indexes



BTW if you need to make certain directory accessible for default set Apache Options (permissions) should be set in /etc/apache2/apache2.conf



Options Indexes
...


This will set Apache directory permissions for all Virtualhost, useful if all virtualhosts share common ServerRoot and the directory has to be accessible via all vhosts.
Well that’s all Cheers 😉