SSI Commands

A brief list of Server Side Include commands

I've added this to my web site because I found it very hard to get this information when I needed it myself. I have included some links at the end of the page of some sites that I have found that do a more comprehensive job then here.

Command	Parameter	Argument Type	Function
#config	var	Definition	Allows to have field formats defined as requested
#echo	var	a SSI variable	Echo, display, the value of the requested variable.
#include	file	file name	Puts the contents of the names file inside the current file.

Config Command
Explanation	The config command allows you to specify the format that will be used for dates, times and file sizes and the text of the generic error message which will be sent to the client if an SSI processing error occurs.
Parameters	errmsg	What will be displayed if there is an error
	sizefmt	When a variable requests returns a size, this allows you to define the format of the size
	timefmt	When a date is being displayed you can define the format of the date using this config parameter Examples of the timefmt can be seen below
Example	<!--#config sizefmt="bytes" -->		This size of this file is : 19,353

Echo Command
Explanation	The echo SSI command. As extensions, it has the parameters "reqstate" (for echoing Jigsaw request states) and "reqheader" (for echoing request header).Also, it can take the flag "here", whose presence means that the variable is to be interpreted at the deepest request level (in the case of chained internal requests), instead of doing so at the top (external request) level. It inserts the value of a variable in the document.
Parameters	var = a SSI variable reqstate = a Jigsaw request state reqheader = a request header here = a flag
Example More examples of Echo below	<!--#echo var="DOCUMENT_URI" --> display the document uri Notice it is a "i", NCSA says "URI" most other people say "URL" but since they set up the standard, we have to do it their way	/Tech_Notes/SSI.shtml

Include Command
Explanation	The SSI include command. (CGI scripts can be included, simply by providing a so-called virtual path to a resource with a CgiFrame).
Parameters	file = the file to include virtual = a virtual path ifheader = a request header else = a file
Example	<!--#include file="included.html" --> include the file "included.html" in the current file <!--#include ifheader="Referer" file="included.html" else="included2.html" --> if the request has a Referer header then include "included.html" else include "included2.html"

More examples of the Echo command

AUTH_TYPE	Client authorization method if any	(none)
DATE_GMT	The present date and time in Greenwich Mean Time. You can format the way the date is displayed by using standard unix date formats .. see below	Tuesday, 07-Sep-2010 20:53:24 GMT
DATE_LOCAL	The current local time zone date and time.	Wednesday, 08-Sep-2010 08:53:24 NZST
DOCUMENT_NAME	The name of the web page file being displayed.	SSI.shtml
LAST_MODIFIED	The date and time of the last modification of the current file.	Tuesday, 11-Sep-2007 16:24:21 NZST
HTTP_USER_AGENT	This returns the name of the browser being used.	CCBot/1.0 (+http://www.commoncrawl.org/bot.html)
REFERER	the referer header of the request	(none)
CONTENT_LENGTH	size of input posted from client	(none)
CONTENT_TYPE	MIME type of content	(none)
DOCUMENT_URI	URL of the document	/Tech_Notes/SSI.shtml
PAGE_COUNT	number of accesses to current document since server was brought on line	(none)
HTTP_REFERER	URL of the document the client came from	(none)
REMOTE_ADDR	Numeric IP address of the client	38.107.191.87
REMOTE_HOST	domain name of the client (DNS option must be active on server)	(none)
REMOTE_USER	ID of user, rarely ever found.	(none)
REQUEST_METHOD	HTTP method: GET OR POST	GET
SERVER_NAME	server hostname.	www.jacsoft.co.nz
SERVER_PORT	the port used by httpd (usually 80)	80
SERVER_PROTOCOL	Which version of Httpd compliance	HTTP/1.1
SERVER_SOFTWARE	The name of the server software.	Apache
TOTAL_HITS	total pages served by server since brought on line	(none)

You can control the exact appearance of your time and date information by setting the timefmt using a config such as the one below. Just include this config before the actual include that calls the date. <!--#config timefmt="%m/%d/%y" --> Will give you today's date as 09/08/10 Note, this date is the date of the server, which is situated in New Zealand !!We lead the world in dates!! The complete list of unix style date format codes follow:

CODE	PURPOSE OF CODE	DISPLAYS
%a	abbreviated weekday name	Wed
%A	full weekday name	Wednesday
%b	abbreviated month name	Sep
%B	full month name	September
%c	locale's appropriate date and time representation	Wed Sep 8 08:53:24 2010
%C	default date and time format	20
%d	day of month - 01 to 31	08
%D	date as %m/%d/%y	09/08/10
%e	day of month - 1 to 31 (single digits are preceded by a blank)	8
%h	abbreviated month name (alias for %b)	Sep
%H	hour - 00 to 23	08
%I	hour - 01 to 12	08
%j	day of year - 001 to 366	251
%m	month of year - 01 to 12	09
%M	minute - 00 to 59	53
%n	insert a newline character
%p	string containing AM or PM	AM
%r	time as %I:%M:%S %p	08:53:24 AM
%R	time as %H:%M	08:53
%S	second - 00 to 61	24
%t	insert a tab character
%T	time as %H:%M:%S	08:53:24
%U	week number of year (Sunday is the first day of the week) - 00 to 53	36
%w	day of week - Sunday=0	3
%W	week number of year (Monday is the first day of the week) - 00 to 53	36
%x	Country-specific date format	09/08/10
%X	Country-specific time format	08:53:24
%y	year within century - 00 to 99	10
%Y	year as CCYY (4 digits)	2010
%Z	timezone name	NZST

Other Sites that talk about SSI Commands.

These are the ones that I got my information from

Apache

Computer Technology Documentation Project

Internet Connection

NCSA SSI Tutorial

The world kiosk

W3C

© JACSoft Programming Ltd.