How to serve a directory listing of a static folder

[paul-dickman]

I'm trying to migrate a course webpage to wowchemy-book. I'd like to add a download directory under static and set it up so that when anyone browses that directory they see a listing of all files in that directory. On my existing site the directory listing is accomplished using a PHP script, but that doesn't seem to work (I believe it's netlify that won't deploy PHP files).

I'm open to any other methods to achieve my goal, which is that any files are dump in a particular directory become available on the website. The directory contains around 500 files.

[chrede88]

I'm not completely sure what you mean by "browsing the directory". If you want to list all the files in a directory relative to static, then you can write a shortcode to do that. Here is an example:

<!-- List refs to files in folder on path relative to ./static -->
{{ $path := .Get "path" }}
{{ $filepath := path.Join "/static" $path }}
{{ $files := readDir $filepath }}

{{ if (fileExists $filepath) }}
  <ul class="list-unstyled">
  {{ range $files }}
    {{ $f := printf "%s/%s" $path .Name | relURL }}
    <li><a href="{{ $f }}" download>{{ .Name }}</li>
  {{ end }}
  </ul>
{{ end }}

Add this code to a shortcode, on path ./layouts/shortcodes/<yourshortcode>.html.
You can use this shortcode in any markdown file by calling: {{< <yourshortcode> path="folder1" >}}.

[paul-dickman]

Thank you Christian, that's very useful!