Server Side Includes

Server Side Includes (SSIs) are simple directives embedded into HTML documents that instruct a Web server to dynamically include data in the HTML document.

Configuration

To configure the Virtual Private Server Apache Web Server to allow server side includes in any directory, connect to your Virtual Private Server via SSH, su to root, and do the following:

1. Uncomment the following AddType directive in the web server configuration file (~/www/conf/httpd.conf) on your Virtual Private Server to designate that all .shtml files be parsed by the web server for server side includes:

   AddType text/html .shtml
   AddHandler server-parsed .shtml

   If you also want .html and .htm files to be parsed for server side includes, add the following lines:

   AddHandler server-parsed .html
   AddHandler server-parsed .htm

2. Add an Includes option to the Options for your Root Document declaration (<Directory /usr/local/etc/httpd/htdocs>) in the web server configuration file (~/www/conf/httpd.conf):

   Options Indexes FollowSymLinks Includes

   NOTE: Due to the fact that allowing SSI's to execute programs can cause a security opening on your server, if you don't need to execute programs (such as included CGI scripts), you may want to use IncludesNoExec in the Options directive instead of just Includes.

3. Restart Your Web Server