Can I create an Apache image directory browser script?

This is a splendid chance to really show off just how powerful and versatile shell scripts can prove for basic Linux interaction, actually, so let's jump in.

First off, when you view a directory in Apache (that is, from within your browser while connected to a Web server running Apache) it displays a listing similar to:

You can see, it's hard to know what's what, particularly if you're not as disciplined with your file naming conventions. How much more useful to have some sort of thumbnail previews of the images in the page!

Turns out you can do just that with a simple shell script named as index.cgi in the images directory (well, you might have to slightly tweak your httpd.conf configuration, but fundamentally it should be easy).

Here's how that script, at its most fundamental, would look:

This script is pretty crude, I admit, because it assumes that everything it matches is an image suitable for being displayed with the HTML "img" tag. If that's true, well, this works just fine, and here's what you get:

That's just the beginning of things you can customize or fine-tune, actually. I have another version of the script on my server that's almost 100 lines long and does all sorts of nifty tricks. Interested? Pay attention to my column in Linux Journal and you'll see it show up there! :-)

One thing to consider: in most modern browsers, specifying a height only or width only in an img tag automatically scales the image down to that size, but proportionally. That makes it pretty straightforward to ensure no one image is too darn big in your directory listing, right? This also means that you could turn this simple script into a basic photo browser too!

Anyway, this should be enough to get you started with a simple image display script on your own Web server!