“Server Side Includes” (SSI for short) are a mechanism which will let you have Apache pre-process html pages before sending them to the browser.
During this pre-processing, Apache will look up for specific directives and replace them by other contents. For example, such directives will let you insert the modification date of the file, display environment variables, insert another file, or even the result of a CGI script.
Few examples of directives :
- fsize : will be replaced by the size of another file. Useful for download pages where you list the packages to download along with their size
- flastmod : will be replaced by the date of last modification of the current file
- include : will let you insert another file where this directive is found (useful for a common header or footer)
To use SSI, you need to activate the mod_include module.