SSI Programming at UIC

	ACADEMIC COMPUTING and COMMUNICATIONS CENTER

Server Side Include Programming
0 Contents	1 Introduction	2 Mechanics	3 Examples	A1 Related Links

Mechanics

The mechanics are pretty simple. Create a normal HTML file, put in the SSI directives, and publish it on the Web in the normal way.

File Extensions

All SSI files need to have the file extension .shtml Don't use .html or .htm for ssi. And, conversely, don't use .shtml unless you are actually using SSI capabilities. The server must read the contents of every .shtml file, whether or not you have SSI directives in it.

You probably know that the special name index.html or index.htm is used, if the URL does not include a specific filename. As it turns out, index.shtml is also acceptable, so you can use SSI as the default file in a directory.

Directives

Here is the complete description of SSI directives. Beware, however, that this is for a newer version of the Web server than we currently have running. An abbreviated version of the directives is below.

An SSI directive always looks like this:

  <!--#element attribute=value attribute=value ... -->

Note that there is no space between the -- and the # sign.

The allowed directives are:

include -- used to include one file in another
flastmod -- used to print the last time the file was modified
fsize -- used to print the file size
exec -- Sorry, this is not valid at UIC. If you want to run CGI, you'll have to run through perlwrap

See the examples for how to use these. It's pretty simple, and easier to understand from the examples.

SSI Previous: 1 Introduction Next: 3 Examples

2005-8-16 wwwtech@uic.edu