My Thoughts:
- .htaccess file. Put in “Options -Indexes” : Good idea however would require quite a bit of working hitting all the sites / sub domains they run.

- Put an index.html file in every folder. Loop through as bash script : While plausable, it would be a pain as there is a bunch of extra files added. Plus everytime you add a new website you have run the script on that folder, along with any other time you add new folders to the website you would have to make sure to put the files in there. In the end, not something I wanted to do.

- cPanel/WHM option : Great idea. However if they implemented this option I sure as hell couldn’t find it. The most I could find regarding indexes was the priority of say “index.php” and “index.html” but not to turn off indexing.

The Solution:
I did some playing around in the httpd.conf file on my home webserver and found the solution. To turn off indexing by default across an entire server find the like. It might not match exact however it must be <Directory />

 <Directory />
  Options All
  AllowOverride All
 </Directory>

If you see Options All replace it with Options -Indexes . If you don’t see a line with Options add it. So it should look like

 <Directory />
  Options -Indexes
  AllowOverride All
 </Directory>

cPanel servers are a little bit different. The files are split up a bit more than other servers. The file you are looking for is located at “/usr/local/apache/conf/access.conf”

This was a public service announcement brought to you by me