CGI Programming on the World Wide Web By Shishir Gundavaram 1st Edition March 1996 This book is out of print, but it has been made available online through the O'Reilly Open Books Project.

Chapter 5

 

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5. Server Side Includes

Contents:
Introduction
Configuration
Environment Variables
Including Boilerplates
File Statistics
Executing External Programs
Executing CGI Programs
Tailoring SSI Output
Common Errors

5.1 Introduction

You're starting to get the hang of CGI, but aren't too thrilled with the fact that you have to write full-fledged CGI programs even when you want to output a document with only a minimum amount of dynamic information, right? For example, say you want to display the current date and time, or a certain CGI environment variable in your otherwise static document. You can go through the trouble of writing a CGI program that outputs this small amount of virtual data, or better yet, you can use a powerful feature called Server Side Includes (or SSI).

Server Side Includes are directives which you can place into your HTML documents to execute other programs or output such data as environment variables and file statistics. Unfortunately, not all servers support these directives; the CERN server cannot handle SSI, but the servers from NCSA and Netscape can. However, there is a CGI program called fakessi.pl that you can use to emulate Server Side Includes if your server does not support them.

While Server Side Includes technically are not really CGI, they can become an important tool for incorporating CGI-like information, as well as output from CGI programs, into documents on the Web.

How do Server Side Includes work? When the client requests a document from the SSI-enabled server, the server parses the specified document and returns the evaluated document (see Figure 5.1). The server does not automatically parse all files looking for SSI directives, but only ones that are configured as such. We will look at how to configure documents in the next section.

Figure 5.1: Server Side Includes

SSI sounds like a great feature, but it does have its disadvantages. First, it can be quite costly for a server to continually parse documents before sending them to the client. And second, enabling SSI creates a security risk. Novice users could possibly embed directives to execute system commands that output confidential information. Despite these shortcomings, SSI can be a very powerful tool if used cautiously.

Table 5.1 lists all the SSI directives. In this chapter, I'll discuss each of these directives in detail.

Table 5.1: SSI Directives

Command	Parameter	Description
echo	var	Inserts value of special SSI variables as well as other environment variables
include		Inserts text of document into current file
	file	Pathname relative to current directory
	virtual	Virtual path to a document on the server
fsize	file	Inserts the size of a specified file
flastmod	file	Inserts the last modification date and time for a specified file
exec		Executes external programs and inserts output in current document
	cmd	Any application on the host
	cgi	CGI program
config		Modifies various aspects of SSI
	errmsg	Default error message
	sizefmt	Format for size of the file
	timefmt	Format for dates

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Decoding Forms in Other Languages		Configuration

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