Skip to content

Nginx File Directory — Troubleshooting

The columns are misaligned

The most common problem with this page specifically.

Alignment comes from literal spaces inside the <pre> block. An HTML formatter, a prettifier, or format-on-save will reflow that content and the columns drift.

Fix:

  1. Turn off format-on-save and any HTML formatter for this file.
  2. Turn off trailing-whitespace trimming.
  3. Use a monospace font so you can see what you are aligning.
  4. Re-space the affected lines by hand.

Note that the example folder and file lines carry different amounts of spacing, because their names differ in length. Copying a line means adjusting its spacing to match your filename.

Every link is hand-written and nothing validates it. Check the href matches the real filename — including case, on a case-sensitive server — and that it is relative to where index.html actually sits.

The listing shows files that are not there

Leftover example lines. Delete every line you did not customise — see Usage.

The heading and the browser tab disagree

Two places carry the directory name: the <title> tag and the <h1>. Changing one and not the other is easy to miss.

It ships commented out. Remove the surrounding <!-- and --> to enable it.

docker pull fails with a name error

Use lowercase:

docker pull ghcr.io/willtheorangeguy/nginx-file-directory:main

GHCR requires lowercase image names.

The container starts but the page is blank

Check the port mapping. The container serves on 80 internally; the documented command maps it to 8000, so use http://localhost:8000/.

GitHub Pages is not updating

docs.yml deploys on push to main. Check the Actions tab — the badge in the README reflects the last run.

An aggressive formatter can strip leading comments. index.html opens with the Nginx notice and the project's own; both are the attribution and should be preserved. Restore them from git if they were removed.

Dates and sizes are wrong

They are plain text and nothing computes them.