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Enable auto index on website hosted on Ubuntu with CyberPanel and OpenLiteSpeed

Ryan Sechrest

• 1 min read
Nine empty sticky notes stuck to the wall.
Indexing empty sticky notes. Because that makes sense.

I have a server at DigitalOcean with Ubuntu, CyberPanel, and OpenLiteSpeed, and wanted one of my websites to display an auto index of all the files uploaded to it.

There is a default.php script in /usr/local/lsws/share/autoindex that simulates Apache’s auto index, which suffices for my needs, but if you don’t want to use the default, you could copy and edit default.php to create your own template.

Now, to enable and use this auto index, you have to adjust the index directive in your website’s virtual host configuration file:

index  {
  useServer   1
  indexFiles  index.php, index.html
  autoIndex   1
}

You’re setting useServer and autoIndex from 0 to 1, which translates to:

  • Enable useServer to use the server’s index file settings
  • Enable autoIndex to generate a directory index on the fly

Before setting useServer and autoIndex to 1, I was getting a 404 page when visiting the site, which makes sense, because there was no index.php or index.html in the website’s root to load a front page. That said, after enabling useServer and autoIndex, it displayed a 500 page, so while that did something, it still wasn’t working.

After a quick chat with the GoLiteSpeed support team on Slack, they prompted me to check the open_basedir setting. If this protection is turned on, it limits the files that can be accessed by PHP to only your website’s directory. As it turns out, that protection was turned on:

phpIniOverride  {
  php_admin_value open_basedir "/tmp:$VH_ROOT"
}

You could remove that directive, i.e. disable the protection, and your auto index would now work perfectly fine, but I’d rather not allow a website to just run any PHP script located anywhere on the server.

Fortunately, the solution is quite simple: just add the path of the default auto index script to the list of paths to exempt that script from the protection:

phpIniOverride  {
  php_admin_value open_basedir "/tmp:/usr/local/lsws/share/autoindex:$VH_ROOT"
}

Upon save, OpenLiteSpeed should be gracefully reloaded, and your auto index should be displayed on your website.

Featured image by Kelly Sikkema.