How to Stop Directory Listing

If you have a lot of files in a directory but no index file, your server will list all the files in that server.


This can cause a lot of problems. For example, one of the most common directories which webmasters forget to hide is the images folder. This allows everyone to view all the images in their images folder. This isn’t usually a major problem though you may have more important files in a directory, perhaps important documents or software.

You can stop this from occurring from using the following code :

IndexIgnore *

The * is a wildcard and stops the server from listing any type of file. You can of course only stop certain files or file types from being listed.

For example :

IndexIgnore *.gif *.jpg *.png accounts.doc

The above code would stop all gif, jpg and png graphics files from being listed.


The accounts.doc document would be blocked too however all other .doc files would be shown.

Basically the IndexIgnore command lets you decide what files in a directory visitors can see.

You can upload an .htaccess file for every directory you want to stop people viewing but it’s more practical to place everything in your main .htaccess file (ie. your root .htaccess).

To do this all you need to do is include the path to the folder(s) you want to protect.

So to block people viewing the files at www.yoursite.com/images/ and www.yoursite.com/banners/ you would the following code to your .htaccess :

IndexIgnore /images/*
IndexIgnore /banners/*