Create static directory listings on GitHub Actions/Pages

Background

Remember those classic directory listings from the early days of the web? They're still useful today, especially for some static sites hosted on GitHub Pages.

In this quick tutorial,I'll show you how to automatically create static directory listings on GitHub Actions/Pages with a simple PHP script I created a while back.

Best parts: It's totally free, has no dependencies, and works perfectly in GitHub Actions as they have a built-in PHP runtime.

Screenshot

Here's a screenshot of the directory listing created by the script:

Trying it locally

To get started, you can try the script locally. Here's how:

Download the script from the GitHub repository:

1wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/caendesilva/php-directory-listing/master/directory-listing.php -O directory-listing.php

Next run the script in your terminal:

1php directory-listing.php

This will create a self-contained index.html file with a directory listing of the current directory.

Using it in GitHub Actions

To use the script in GitHub Actions, you can base it on this sample workflow:

 1# GitHub Actions demo to create a directory listing for the repository files to publish to GitHub Pages
 2 
 3name: Demo Action
 4 
 5on:
 6  push:
 7    branches: [ "main" ]
 8 
 9permissions:
10  contents: read
11  pages: write
12  id-token: write
13 
14jobs:
15  build:
16    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
17 
18    steps:
19      - uses: actions/checkout@v3
20 
21      # Download the directory listing script
22      - name: Download Directory Listing Script
23        run: wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/caendesilva/php-directory-listing/master/directory-listing.php -O directory-listing.php
24 
25      # Run the directory listing script
26      - name: Run Directory Listing Script
27        run: php directory-listing.php
28 
29      # Optional: Deploy to GitHub Pages (you can also commit the file to your repository)
30      - name: Setup Pages
31        uses: actions/configure-pages@v5
32      - name: Upload artifact
33        uses: actions/upload-pages-artifact@v3
34        with:
35          path: '.'
36      - name: Deploy to GitHub Pages
37        id: deployment
38        uses: actions/deploy-pages@v4

This workflow will create a directory listing of the repository files and publish it to GitHub Pages.

Conclusion

That's it! You now have a simple way to create static directory listings on GitHub Actions/Pages. Feel free to customize the script or workflow to fit your needs.

See the source code at https://github.com/caendesilva/php-directory-listing and try the live demo at https://git.desilva.se/php-directory-listing/.

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