IndexIgnore
IndexIgnore file1 file2 ...
Server config, virtual host, directory, .htaccess
We can specify a description for individual files or for a list of
them. We can exclude files from the listing with
IndexIgnore.
IndexIgnore is followed by a list of files or
wildcards to describe files. As we see in the following example,
multiple IndexIgnores add to the list rather than
replacing each other. By default, the list includes
“.”.
You might well want to ignore .ht* files so that the Bad Guys can’t look at the actual .htaccess files. Here we want to ignore the *.jpg files (which are not much use without the .html files that display them and explain what they show) and the parent directory, known to Unix and to Win32 as “..”:
... <Directory /usr/www/APAC HE3/fancyindex.txt/htdocs> FancyIndexing on AddDescription "One of our wonderful catalogs" catalog_autumn.html catalog_summer.html IndexIgnore *.jpg .. </Directory>
You might want to use
IndexIgnore for security reasons as well: what the
eye doesn’t see, the mouse finger
can’t steal.[1] You can
put in extra IndexIgnore lines, and the effects
are cumulative, so we could just as well write:
<Directory /usr/www/APACHE3/fancyindex.txt/htdocs> FancyIndexing on AddDescription "One of our wonderful catalogs" catalog_autumn.html catalog_summer.html IndexIgnore *.jpg IndexIgnore .. </Directory>
[1] While you should never rely solely on security by obscurity, it doesn’t hurt, and it can be a useful supplement.