Improvements to django.views.static.serve directory indexes

[Chris Beaven]

This patch sorts indexes and shows directories before files.
It also adds functionality for providing an index prefix so the template can show the full indexed path correctly.

[George Vilches]

Being that the way a directory is sorted is an OS-specific choice, with *nix users getting solidly alphabetic sorting, and Windows users getting folder then file sorting, this should be an either/or option, not a unilateral change.

[Chris Beaven]

My view is that it should be consistent no matter what OS is running the server. But pushing do a design decision.

[Jannis Leidel]

I agree with SmileyChris, this should be made consistent across the different OSs.

[Eric Holscher]

Seems like a good idea. However the new prefix needs to be documented, and this is a good candidate for testing, especially because it might vary across platforms.

[Chris Beaven]

I've redone this for static-file awareness, patch can be found here:

​https://github.com/SmileyChris/django/compare/master...11495-static-directory-indexes

[Jannis Leidel]

Hm, that branch goes a bit further than the ticket suggested, also listing all files/folders that the staticfiles finders find. IMO requires more discussion on -dev list.

[Chris Beaven]

It does, since how indexes currently work with staticfiles now doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

I'm in agreement that it definitely requires more discussion.

[Aymeric Augustin]

Change UI/UX from NULL to False.

[Aymeric Augustin]

Change Easy pickings from NULL to False.

[Jannis Leidel]

The branch isn't there anymore, any chance to update the patch here?

[Chris Beaven]

I haven't looked at updating the branch, but it can be found here now (tied to the old django/django github repo):

​https://github.com/SmileyChris/django-old/compare/master...11495-static-directory-indexes

[Aymeric Augustin]

What is the use case for this?

[Preston Holmes]

Why should views.static.serve consider static file finders? As documented it is just a directory based tool.

I'd move to splitting this into two tickets. Accept this one which has the narrow scope of standardizing the sort order across OS versions for basic static.serve, I think this isn't too contentious.

The issue of how to incorporate static-file finders into index display can be sorted out separately, with its rationale and design proposal.

[Collin Anderson]

I think we should deprecate and remove show_indexes completely. What do people use it for?

[Tim Graham]

It seems show_indexes dates back to when the view was first added in 572ac3e7dfadec6434527ebbdccef97de1cc191c. I didn't see any mention in the ticket about why this functionality was needed. I guess it makes it a bit easier to debug if you have a typo in a file name or something (rather than opening up a file browser). Collin, can you present your rationale for deprecating it? No doubt some people like it and use it.

[Collin Anderson]

My goal would be to start fully supporting using static.serve() (or something like it) in production (in 1.9), but we wouldn't want to support show_indexes in production.

Also, as mentioned, now that we have the staticfiles framework, this little feature is a lot harder to get right.

It seems to me, if you want a web index of files, you could just run python3 -m http.server 8080.

There's also this django-developers discussion: ​https://groups.google.com/d/topic/django-developers/N0KbgDeLuUE/discussion