Enabling autoindex conditionally for directories within the Nginx root?

Question

Occasionally I need some plain browsable directories on my site. I do achieve this with the following config:

 ... root /var/www/example.com/file_dump; autoindex off; ... location / { try_files $uri /error.html @django; } location @django { ... } location ~ ^/test/.+/? { autoindex on; } 

So if I would create a directory /var/www/example.com/file_dump/test/something, I would get the list of files at the address example.com/test/something.

I have tried to be smarter than this with the following config:

 location / { if (!-d test/$uri) { autoindex on; } try_files $uri /error.html @django; } 

But I've met the following error:

nginx: [emerg] "autoindex" directive is not allowed here...

Why Nginx does not allow autoindex within the conditional statements? Can I enable autoindex dynamically by the other means?

Answer 1

Since the enabled/disabled autoindex feature is a location-only property, your only way is to use different locations for autoindex-enabled and autoindex-disabled requests. Although some nginx directives allow using the variables as their arguments, autoindex is not one of those.

It is completely unclear what do you want to achieve checking the if (!-d test/$uri) { ... } statement. If that was meaning if $uri is some existing directory under /var/www/example.com/file_dump/test/ directory, here is a possible workaround:

server { ... set $is_dir loc_default; if (-d $document_root$uri) { set $is_dir loc_index; } set $loc loc_default; if ($uri ~ ^/test/.) { set $loc $is_dir; } location / { try_files /dev/null @$loc; } location @loc_default { try_files $uri /error.html @django; } location @loc_index { autoindex on; # try_files $uri $uri/ =404 is assumed by default } location @django { ... } } 

However it is absolutely meaningless to check if the $uri is an existing directory, using just

 set $loc loc_default; if ($uri ~ ^/test/.) { set $loc loc_index; } 

will give you the same behavior.

Same thing can be achieved using the map block:

map $uri $loc { ~^/test/. loc_index; # you can check multiply patterns here, for example ~^/another/ loc_index; # if none matched default loc_default; } server { ... location / { try_files /dev/null @$loc; } location @loc_default { try_files $uri /error.html @django; } location @loc_index { autoindex on; # try_files $uri $uri/ =404 is assumed by default } location @django { ... } } 

The try_files /dev/null <named_location> trick is taken from this excellent answer.