This could arguably be the expected behavior, but I guess maybe we could have an option to decide whether directory URLs should be displayed as 404 when 404.html is present or to display the directory.

On second thought it does make sense that when -d is specified that directories should be displayed even when 404.html is present

I think this would be better as an option to specify 404 files. I'm also remembering nginx has a very unfortunate issue where it's difficult to specify all the 40x/50x pages in general, so learning from that http-server should also have the option to specify a general error page if we add this.

@KernelDeimos So like, an option to specify whether magic 404s should be displayed for directories, if -d is enabled?

Actually I missed an important detail when I read this at first - specifically that the magic 404.html is something already supported (which seemed to be implied; I'm going to test it myself shortly). I was suggesting a config param to specify the location of a 404 page.

I agree with your statement earlier that -d should imply we don't want to display the 404 page for directory listings. I need to explore a bit more to find out how parent directories etc are handled; do you remember if this is consistent for directories under a directory that contains a 404.html?

Just did a bit of testing. Since -d defaults to true I'm going to go back to the position that we need a separate config flag for this. If we have -d do this we introduce behavior that exposes directory structures which previously weren't exposed, which is a regression with security implications.

Flag should be verbose and clear for now (I want to hold off reserving new letters for a bit), like --listings-override-404. If someone PRs this I'll merge it.

@KernelDeimos I implemented this feature locally, in the following days I'll make a fork and also add tests. I'll upload the fork tomorrow so you can see my implementation.

Hello, here is the PR: #894