Customizing the Tomcat Directory Listing

Tomcat's directory listings feature is provided by the DefaultServlet. The look of the listing can be customised using XSL transformation.

There are two steps involved:

• Replicate the DefaultServlet web.xml settings from the server-wide web.xml file in <jakarta>/conf/web.xml, taking care to give it a new name. See Enabling or Disabling Directory Listings using web.xml for an example of how to do this.
• Add a localXsltFile parameter in your application's web.xml file, to define a relative path of an XSL file to use for transforming the output.

As the Tomcat documentation now contains an XSL example file which mimics the normal output of the directory listing, there is no need to repeat the code here. Instead, please see http://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-5.5-doc/default-servlet.html.

See Also

• Enabling or Disabling Directory Listings using web.xml - a guide to using a local version of the DefaultServlet in your own web.xml
• Tomcat Documentation for the DefaultServlet
• web.xml Reference Guide