Apache Cookbook, 2nd Edition

8.9. Getting SSIs to Work

Problem

You want to enable Server-Side Includes (SSIs) to make your HTML documents more dynamic.

Solution

There are at least two different ways of doing this.

Specify which files are to be parsed by using a filename extension such as .shtml. For Apache 1.3, add the following directives to your httpd.conf in the appropriate scope:

<Directory /www/html/example>
    Options +Includes
    AddHandler server-parsed .shtml
    AddType "text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1" .shtml
</Directory>

Or, for Apache 2.0 and later:

<Directory /www/html/example>
    Options +Includes
    AddType text/html .shtml
    AddFilter INCLUDES .shtml
</Directory>

The second method is to add the XBitHack directive to the appropriate scope in your httpd.conf file and allow the file permissions to indicate which files are to be parsed for SSI directives:

XBitHack On

Discussion

SSIs provide a way to add dynamic content to an HTML page via a variety of simple tags. This functionality is implemented by the mod_include module, which is documented at http://httpd.apache.org/docs/mod/mod_include.html. There is also a how-to-style document available at http://httpd.apache.org/docs/howto/ssi.html.

The first solution provided here tells Apache to parse all .shtml files for SSI directives. So, to test that the solution has been effective, create a file called something.shtml, and put the following line in it:

File last modified at '<!--#echo var="LAST_MODIFIED" -->'.

Tip

Note the space between the last argument and the closing "-->". This ...