Document Storage Project

• Part 1: What we’re doing
• Part 2: Setting up a base system

This is Part 3: Configuring Apache.

We’re only looking for a fairly simple interface to browse through documents. Apache already gives us that – you just need to enable a feature called “Indexes”. But the default indexing is pretty ugly; it’d be nice to make it look a little prettier and maybe add scope for expanding on functionality.

Initially I was going to design my own style, but it turns out someone’s already done that and he’s done a better job than I could ever hope to. So I took the style setup from Recursive Design and tweaked it slightly to fit in with what we’re doing here.

  cd /home/http/assets
  svn co http://recursive-design.com/svn/misc/apache/index-style
  mv index-style/* . 
  rmdir index-style

The stylesheet really ought to be referenced with a specific path so it can always be found. Edit /home/http/assets/header.html and change the stylesheet reference thus:

Next up, we need to configure Apache. Ignore the instructions on the Recursive Design blog; things are slightly different here. Edit /etc/apache2/sites-available/default as follows:

        ServerAdmin (YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS HERE)

        DocumentRoot /home/http/documents
        
                Options FollowSymLinks
                AllowOverride None
        
        
                AllowOverride None
                Options Indexes
                DirectoryIndex index.html index.php
                IndexOptions FancyIndexing
                IndexOptions VersionSort
                IndexOptions HTMLTable
                IndexOptions FoldersFirst
                IndexOptions IconsAreLinks
                IndexOptions IgnoreCase
                IndexOptions SuppressDescription
                IndexOptions SuppressHTMLPreamble
                IndexOptions XHTML
                IndexOptions IconWidth=16
                IndexOptions IconHeight=16
                IndexOptions NameWidth=*
                IndexOrderDefault Descending Name
                HeaderName /assets/header.html
                ReadmeName /assets/footer.html
                Order allow,deny
                Allow from all
        

        Alias /assets /home/http/assets
        Alias /search /home/http/search

        
                AllowOverride None
                Order allow,deny
                Allow from all
        

        
                AllowOverride None
                Order allow,deny
                Allow from all
        

        ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ /usr/lib/cgi-bin/

 ..... LEAVE THE REST OF THE FILE ALONE ......

Restart Apache.

Put something – ideally a PDF that was NOT generated from a scan but instead contains searchable text – into /home/http/documents and browse to http://(hostname).local from a separate PC on the network. If all goes according to plan, you should see something a bit like this:

There’s a lot more to do: we still need something that can index this little lot (so we can just punch in search terms) and we need some easy way to get documents onto the server. But they’re a topic for a future post…