How to create a browsable files directory site in Netlify?

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#1

Looking for feasible ideas, I have too many of my own chaotic ideas at the moment.
Basically, I want to simulate Apache httpd’s mod_autoindex. I want to publish/build/deploy a large quantity of files (documents, 90% small PDFs, 3-4 GB total) via GitHub with Git-LFS to Netlify. A daily or twice daily update is probably good enough.
I need a simple directory index and parent directory navigation (like mod_autoindex).

I know Git (lfs) committing to a LFS GitHub repo and auto deploying to Netlify works fine. It’s just missing the directory style “browsable” index.

Any ideas on how simplest to create an html page style directory file index approach or maybe a serverless function to dynamically generate?

List files in another directory from lambda function
#2

Feel free to tell me it’s a terrible idea too.

#3

@moop-moop Interesting question.

The easiest way would be to build it locally using bash or PHP or Scrutiny and then just commit it. That’s not very imaginative, though. Sorry.

List files in another directory from lambda function
#4

I am wondering if an S3 backend with GitHub - awslabs/aws-js-s3-explorer: AWS JavaScript S3 Explorer is a JavaScript application that uses AWS's JavaScript SDK and S3 APIs to make the contents of an S3 bucket easy to browse via a web browser. , simply proxied through our Netlify sites.
Or a serverless function that would do the S3 interaction like in GitHub - juvs/s3-bucket-browser: AWS S3 Bucket Browser, based on AWS JavaScript API to serve a dynamic directory index.

#5

That’s definitely a workable idea.
It’s file browsing, so doesn’t require a “sharks with lasers on their heads” solution.

#6

I think you can use a static site generator like Hugo. It has a function called readDir. You can achive what you want in a few lines of Go templating code. So, any more PDF files that you add would automatically get a link to them on the page. If you want, I can put together a working example.