[enhancement] Allow downloading directories about ngx-fancyindex

[aperezdc]

The potential problem I see with this is that requesting a whole directory may end up in huge transfers being sent to the clients. Not to mention that it would add quite a bit of complexity to the module. I will think about it a bit more, but so far what would be best in my opinion is to put this fuctionality in a separate module.

[lnicola]

I suppose that directory downloads could be disabled by configuration.

I agree about the complexity argument. On the other hand, I'm not familiar to the NGINX module API, but ngx-fancyindex seems already complex as-is. Perhaps some of this is inherent to the API? :)

A while ago I looked into implementing something like this for Lighttpd. It seemed to me that Lighttpd plugins output chains of chuks of a few types, which include strings, byte arrays and file fragments. The tar format is well-fit for this, since it can be built on-the fly: it's got file headers followed by data [1]. This even allows for sendfile to be used by the server.

The NGINX API seemed similar to this, but somewhat more involved.

[1] Things are a bit more fiddly than this because of the need to handle long file names and symlinks, but it's still streamable.

[aperezdc]

Yes, the Nginx API might be a bit more complex, but things are still manageable and streaming the created tarball to the client in chunks is certainly possible. My concern is about the complexity... anyhoo, I will revisit this idea after tagging the 0.4.0 release.

[mapsic]

I can't find fancyindex.conf in my centos6.6

[lnicola]

@mapsic ngx-fancyindex is an Nginx plugin. Until recently you had to build these plugins together with Nginx in order to use them, although it now supports shared linking. I don't know how it's done now.

[aperezdc]

@lnicola, @mapsic: Presently it's possible to build modules for Nginx and load them dynamically. This feature was introduced in Nginx 1.9.11, and is supported by ngx-fancyindex.