Hack #74. Make Apache Directory Listing Prettier
Enhance Apache's autogenerated directory listing pages with semantic, accessible tables.
Have you ever visited a page to find nothing but a plain list of files? If a folder has no default web page, the Apache web server autogenerates a directory listing with clickable filenames. Nothing fancy, but it works, so why complain? Because we can do better! This hack takes the raw data presented in Apache directory listings and replaces the entire page with a prettier, more accessible, more functional version.
The Code
This user script runs on all pages. Of course, not all pages are Apache directory listings, so the first thing the script does is check for some common signs that this page is a directory listing. Unfortunately, there is no foolproof way to tell; recent versions of Apache add a <meta> element in the <head> of the page to say that the page was autogenerated by Apache, but earlier versions of Apache did not do this. The script checks for three things:
The title of the page starts with "Index of /".
The body of the page contains a
<pre>element. Apache uses this to display the plain directory listing.The body of the page contains links with query parameters. Apache uses these for the column headers. Clicking a column header link re-sorts the directory listing by name, modification date, or size.
If all three of these conditions are met, the script assumes the page is an Apache directory listing, and proceeds to parse the preformatted ...
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