Server Side Includes Demo

Please note that turning on server side includes slows the responsiveness of the affected documents because the server must parse them.

Example

Wed May 20 06:04:08 PDT 1998

Ingredients

• The server side include:

  <!--#exec cmd="/home/jdoe/cgi-bin/showdate.sh"-->

  This text fragment should be placed in your HTML document at the point you want it's output inserted. Place the command to be executed by /bin/sh (in this case date) between the quotes.

• The short script /home/jdoe/cgi-bin/showdate.sh:

  #!/bin/sh
  /bin/date
  

• The file .htaccess.

  This file should be in the directory which contains the documents you want to be able to use server side includes in. The contents of this file tell the server to parse the .html files in this directory.

  If you are uploading this file be sure to transfer it with your FTP client in text mode. This will ensure the end of line characters are translated appropriately. Unix uses LF (linefeeds) to indicated the end of lines, the Mac uses CR (carrige returns), and DOS uses CR LF pairs at the end of lines.

Security And Performance Issues

• Source Available For Inspection

  If your server side include executes a compiled program (for example, one written in C) you must keep the source on the server.

• Respect For Server Resources

  Your server side include must not create performance problems on the server. Simple guidelines for what is reasonable is the load imposed by imagemap or cgiemail.

Further Study

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