Apache: The Definitive Guide, 3rd Edition

DirectoryIndex

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.

DirectoryIndex local-url local-url ...
Default: index.html
Server config, virtual host, directory, .htaccess

local-url is the 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 exists and IndexOptions is set, the server will generate its own listing of the directory. For example, if this is the specification:

DirectoryIndex index.html

then a request for http://myserver/docs/ would return http://myserver/docs/index.html if it did not exist; if it exists, the request would list the directory, provided indexing was allowed. Note that the documents do not need to be relative to the directory:

DirectoryIndex index.html index.txt /cgi-bin/index.pl

This would cause the CGI script /cgi-bin/index.pl to be executed if neither index.html nor index.txt existed in a directory.

A common technique for getting a CGI script to run immediately when a site is accessed is to declare it as the DirectoryIndex:

DirectoryIndex /cgi-bin/my_start_script

If this is to work, redirection to cgi-bin must have been arranged using ScriptAlias or ScriptAliasMatch higher up in the Config file.

The Config file from ... /site.ownindex is as follows: ...