Using Server-side Includes (SSI)

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Saturday, 26-May-2012 10:58:06 CDT

Using SSI

Server-side includes allow a document to have variable information. I.e., instead of editing the file and changing the content, you may reference other data to be included in the document. Other data may be modification times, other HTML files (perhaps a standard header/footer format) or other information.

SSI is activated only for those files whose suffix is ".shtml". Normal HTML files (those ending with .html) may contain SSI commands, but they will be ignored. In other words, you must rename your files from filename.html to filename.shtml to activate SSI.

SSI HTML syntax

The basic syntax is

  <!--#keyword tag1="name" tag2="name" ...-->

The popular use of SSI is to include other documents and to display the time a file was last modified. The following keywords will be most helpful for these tasks:

echo

The echo keyword allows the value of various variables to be displayed (included). echo recognizes one tag, var, which has a name value set to the name of the variable to display. Ex:  would include that date and time that the current HTML document was last changed.

include

include allows other HTML documents (which may contain SSI commands, too) to be included into the current document. The include keyword recognizes two tags: virtual and file.

Virtual documents are those listed as in a URL: The virtual path of http://www.univ.edu/topic/index.html is simply "/topic/index.html". The difference between a virtual path and a URL is that the virtual filename will exist on the server from which the current HTML document resides, whereas a URL specifies a particular host.
File tags refer to an actual file relative to the current document. ../ notation is not allowed, so the path is relative to the current virtual directory. Files in subdirectories may be accessed, but nothing "above".

The virtual keyword is probably the most versatile of the two.
Ex:  would include header.html from the current directory.

flastmod

flastmod prints the last modification date of the specified file, which differs from the echo command described above in the fact that echo LAST_MODIFIED refers to the current web document. flastmod recognizes the same two tags as include.

fsize

fsize reports the size of the specified file. Valid tags are virtual and file, as with include. A good use is to warn the user when a significant file will be transferred - place this include inside ()'s after the anchor in the text.

Examples


: [an error occurred while processing this directive]

: [an error occurred while processing this directive] bytes
: [an error occurred while processing this directive]
: Wednesday, 08-Aug-2001 10:16:44 CDT
: Saturday, 26-May-2012 10:58:06 CDT

Other Info Official NCSA HTTPd documents cover SSI in more detail. Last modified Wednesday, 08-Aug-2001 10:16:44 CDT