Stop people from viewing contents of a directory

Question

I want to stop people from viewing the contents of my images directory. I've built an app using Codeigniter and notice that they just have index.html pages with a 403 Forbidden message in all directories - is this a secure method to use? Is an index.html page in the directory sufficient or do I need to update config or .htaccess?

Answer 1

The .htaccess solution should work if you're comfortable using it.

Options -Indexes

If you are on a shared host with cPanel, you can change your settings in Index Manager

Cpanel - Index Manager

Answer 2

The index.html should be enough and secure, but it is not really a clean solution, because it is not actually returning a error message, it is probably still returning HTTP 200 and then showing the html page with error 403.

The clean solution would be adding

Options -Indexes

to the .htaccess file.