Webserver directory index

From Free net encyclopedia

When an HTTP client (generally a web browser) requests a URL that points at just a directory rather than at a file within a directory the web server will generally serve up some kind of main or index page.

index.html is the traditional filename for such a page, but most decent webservers will allow a list of filenames to be configured. If a server is set up to support server-side scripting then there will usually be entries in the list to allow dynamic content to be used as the index page (for example: index.php, index.shtml, default.asp). In the popular opensource web server Apache the list of filenames is controlled by the DirectoryIndex directive in the configuration file.

If the webserver cannot find a page with any of the names its set to try then it may either return an error (generally 404 (Not Found) ) or create its own index page of the files in the directory. This is usually also a configuarable option.

In order to allow relative links to work correctly the URL for a directory must end with a slash. If it does not then most webservers will send a http redirect to add the slash.

http://www.mysite.tld is not really a valid url but almost all browsers will turn it into http://www.mysite.tld/ automatically and this will then result in the serving up of the index page from the root directory of the website.pt:Index.html