Knowledge Base

HOME: SSI

Server Side Includes

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3. How to Use SSI

The simplest example of server-parsed HTML is to have a file "foo.shtml" containing this text:



Line one

<!--#exec cgi="mycgi.cgi" --><P>

Line three



And then have a file "mycgi.cgi" that contains, on Unix:



#!/usr/bin/perl



print "Content-type: text/html\n\n";

print "Line Two";





And when you access "foo.shtml", it will output:



Line one

Line two

Line three





If your include directive is <!--#exec cgi="..." -->, then the cgi program you run must output a standard CGI header (Content-type: text/html)





Any file named foo.shtml will be parsed automatically by Apache on our servers.

Do not put any spaces before the '#' character in your include directives; if you have "<!-- #exec" instead of "<!--#exec", the line will be ignored.



Server-side includes in "custom trailers" will not work, since custom trailers are appended to the output of your web pages after all other processing has been done on them. Any server-side includes that you put into your custom trailers will be sent directly to the browser without being parsed.



More Help for using SSI can be found at:

http://hoohoo.ncsa.uiuc.edu/docs/tutorials/includes.html


Updated: January 12, 2001

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