Apache: The Definitive Guide, 3rd Edition

Chapter 14. Server-Side Includes

Server-side includes trigger further actions whose output, if any, may then be placed inline into served documents or affect subsequent includes. The same results could be achieved by CGI scripts — either shell scripts or specially written C programs — but server-side includes often achieve these results with a lot less effort. There are, however, some security problems. The range of possible actions is immense, so we will just give basic illustrations of each command in a number of text files in ...site.ssi/htdocs.

The Config file, .../conf/httpd1.conf, is as follows:

User webuser
Group webgroup
ServerName www.butterthlies.com
DocumentRoot /usr/www/APACHE3/site.ssi/htdocs
ScriptAlias /cgi-bin /usr/www/APACHE3/cgi-bin
AddHandler server-parsed shtml
         Options +Includes

Run it by executing ./go 1.

shtml is the normal extension for HTML documents with server-side includes in them and is found as the extension to the relevant files in ... /htdocs. We could just as well use brian or dog_run, as long as it appears the same in the file with the relevant command and in the configuration file. Using html can be useful — for instance, you can easily implement site-wide headers and footers — but it does mean that every HTML page gets parsed by the SSI engine. On busy systems, this could reduce performance.

Bear in mind that HTML generated by a CGI script does not get put through the SSI processor, so it’s no good including the markup listed in this chapter in ...