Folder’s Web walks a directory tree, given by a root folder that you specify in the program, and generates an index.html file in every non-empty folder. The root folder itself is also indexed. Files called sitemap.xml and sitemap.xml.gz will be placed into the root folder, which contain a sitemap of all the folders in which an index.html file was created by Folder’s Web.
When Starting Path (Root) and Base URL are entered, and Go is clicked, the Log tab will be populated with detailed information while the template engine processes and generates files. The Updated tab will be populated with the relative paths in which index.html and/or sitemap files have been generated (i.e. a list of relative paths that contain newly-generated index.html and/or sitemap files).
Each index.html file is generated based on a “master” template file in the root folder. A “header” and/or a “content” file can be placed in each folder, which will be included in the final index.html file, written to each folder. In case the current folder does not have a header and/or content file, then the generated header and/or content sections for the given index.html will be empty.
Folder’s Web can also be configured to ignore certain filenames, so that they will not be included inside the listings of the generated index.html files.
index.html files are not generated in empty folders. An empty folder is a folder that does not contain any listable files, either because all the ignored files in it have been filtered out, or because it does not contain any files or sub-folders on the file system. However, empty folders are still listed in their parent folders, but no anchor link is generated in the parent folder’s listing, to enter the empty folder, and neither is an index.html generated in the empty folder, as previously stated. Folder’s Web’s settings file uses a JSON configuration format. The name of the settings file is hardcoded as foldersweb.json, and the file should be placed in the same location as foldersweb.exe. An example of foldersweb.json:
{
“rootFolder”: “c:pathtorootfolder”,
“baseURL”: “http://example.com/”,
“ignoreFiles”: [“index.htm”, “index.html”, “_header.html”,
“_content.html”, “desktop.ini”]
}