Let’s find out how NGINX Autoindex Sort by Date works in this article. At Bobcares, with our Server Management Service, we can handle your issues.

NGINX Autoindex Sort By Date

Nginx can create directory listings for directories without index files thanks to autoindexing. It also helps in serving static files or building a file-sharing website where users may browse and download files straight from the server. Nginx autoindex arranges listings alphabetically by filename by default. But it doesn’t supports sorting by date.

So, we must use custom solutions if we wanted to arrange directory listings by date. Here are some methods to obtain sorting by date:

1. Method 1: To sort files by date, we can modify the behavior of autoindexing using a third-party Nginx module or build a script. Certain modules, like the ngx-fancyindexmodule, offer more features and options for customizing listings, including the ability to order listings.

2. Method 2: Another method is to create directory listings with unique sorting choices using server-side scripting languages like Perl, PHP, or Python. Nginx would be set up to forward directory listing requests to the relevant script, which would provide the listing arranged accordingly.

3. Method 3: We can preprocess the listings before using Nginx to serve them if we have control over the files in the directories that are being served. Else, we can also rely on Nginx’s autoindexing feature and use a script to create an index file with sorted listings and serve that file.

An Example

Here, we are using ngx-fancyindex module to achieve sorting by date.

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Conclusion

In summary, the article offers 3 different ways from our Support team in which we can obtain sorting by date in Nginx autoindex.