How to install h5ai or similar for sharing?

Support
1

Problem Description
Is it possible to install something like h5ai [1], or similar, to provide added functionalities to the shared directories? The main objective would be to allow downloading whole folders. Unfortunately I know very little about apache, so I mostly tried random stuff (I know, I know…). Also, it’s my first time on the forum, so I’m not really sure that this is the right section. I will still try to respect the format. Please excuse me if this is out of line.

Steps to Reproduce

  1. Set up a share, either public or not.
  2. Install h5ai or something similar.
  3. Write something in the apache configuration files.
  4. Visit the share.

Expected Results

  1. The ability to download entire folders at once.
  2. Possibly added benefits, depending on what was installed, like previews for some file types.
  3. Gratitude towards anybody who helped.

Actual results
None, I really don’t know what I’m doing.

Thank you very much in advance!

References
[1] GitHub - lrsjng/h5ai: HTTP web server index for Apache httpd, lighttpd and nginx.

2

Were you able to make any progress with this? I just ssh’d into my box to check it out and it’s not that difficult to set up.

Unless you intentionally changed where your Apache document root folder is, it should be at /var/www/html. Connect to the box with ssh and navigate to that folder.

cd /var/www/html

ls should show you the index.html file. In my case that was the only thing in the folder.

You can download the h5ai file directly into this folder with the curl command. First go to the release page and pick whichever release you want to install. Unless you have a compelling reason to pick an earlier release, I would just pick the most recent one. Right click to save the link address, then use it in your curl command. Mine looked like this:

sudo curl -o h5ai-0.30.0.zip https://release.larsjung.de/h5ai/h5ai-0.30.0.zip

I had to install unzip real quick because it wasn’t on my machine, then unzipped the file.

sudo apt install unzip

sudo unzip h5ai-0.30.0.zip

Once you get that folder in there you should be able to get to the test url they have in the documentation (http://YOUR-DOMAIN/_h5ai/public/index.php). I tried mine with both the DDNS domain for my box, and the plain old local IP address for my box (192.168…et cetera) and both worked just fine.

That’s it! From there you should be able to use the documentation to get the results you are hoping for.

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3

Thank you so much for the reply! I followed your steps, and found my mistake: I had installed the h5ai folder in /var/www instead of /var/www/html.

I know it’s a silly mistake, but this whole thing has been a great learning experience. Thank you again!

1 Like