How to Create an On-line Directory with Links to Everything in That Directory

Create an On-line Directory with Links to Everything in That Directory

Normally, when a browser opens an on-line folder, the browser looks for a file called index.html or index.htm.
In the example shown below, the browser would navigate to the folder Some Folder and open index.html. If that file contained links to the other files in the directory, a visitor would see the links and could click on any of them to view the content of each.
If the HTML author didn't create links to the files below, they would not display on the page though the directory contains the files below in addition to the file index.html.

photo1.jpg
photo2.jpg
photo3.gif
document.doc
document.pdf
html file.html

On-line demo of this; no links to the listed files were created.

Lacking the index.html file, when a visitor clicked on Some Folder, he or she would see the message 403 Forbidden

To display all of the files listed without an index.html file, do the following
Open Notepad or any other text editor, create a file called .htaccess
Notice the preceding dot (.) and the fact that the file has no extension (such as .txt)

In that file, insert the line Options +Indexes
Save the file and upload it to the directory in which you want to display all content (Some Folder)
You cannot create this file using Word or any other word processing program.

Now, when visitors go to that location, they will see all the files as long as the file index.html has been removed.

On-line demo

Here is a screen shot of the .htaccess file

../