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Jan K. Labanowski: "Tomcat, servlets, JSPs and other friends"

SSI -- Server Side Includes

This approach was first used in HTTPD server (from NCSA), and then incorporated into Apache. Now, it is a de facto standard and present in many commercial Web servers. How it works?

  • File needs to have special extension. Usually .shtml is used.
  • Files with the .shtml are processed through a filter which looks for HTML comments <!--#somekeyword... --> with a special syntax.
  • The special comment is replaced with dynamic content.

There are many SSI types. The popular SSIs are:

  • <!--#include file="somefile" --> replaces tag with a file.
  • <!--#set var="script_dir" value="/usr/local/bin" --> sets an environment variable (so the next call to a script can use it
  • <!--#exec cgi="/cgi-bin/list_directory.pl" --> executes a CGI script
  • <!--#exec cmd="ps -ef | grep nobody" --> executes a system commad (here it lists processes run by user nobody

Detailed syntax of SSI is avaliable from Apache Web site: http://httpd.apache.org/

Modified: Wed Feb 20 06:49:04 2002 GMT
Page accessed 4569 times since Mon Feb 3 15:33:33 2003 GMT