SSI.cgi is a standalone SSI (Server Side Includes) interpreter, intended for use with lightweight webservers (such as Cherokee) that themselves do not support SSI. SSI.cgi script is implemented using C, with the intention of minimizing both overheads and dependency requirements.
The project started when I was considering possible alternatives to Apache, the webserver I have used in the past for both my own websites and those I have setup for other people. I came across Cherokee, which seemed to offer a good balance between being lightweight (in particular, ease of setup) and features that are useful. In particular its ability to run scripts under different Unix users didn't require the awkward setting up that suexec and suPHP needed.
The big problem is that my more recent sites used SSI to avoid duplicating common page components such as headers. Although one possibility was to convert the sites to use PHP instead, this was not something I wanted to do. I also didn't want to use Perl, which was required by the SSI parsers I came across on the web. In the end I decided to write my own parser, and SSI.cgi was the result.
Supported directives
include - Include a file
file
Included file is relative to the filesystem directory of current file.
docroot
Included file is relative to the document root on the filesystem. Some SSI documents state this is the behaviour of the virtual parameter.
virtual
Included file is relative to URL of the document. This will trigger a fetch request to the server, so the included files will need to be HTTP-accessible, at least for requests originating from the system hosting SSI.cgi. This approach is required as SSI.cgi is unaware of URL-to-filesystem mappings that may be in force on the server.
echo - Display a parameter (or enviornment variable)
var
Name of variable to print. Multiple var parameters may be included
encoding
Encoding to use when printing variable. The encoding affects all var= parameter between itself and either the next encoding parameter or the end of the echo command. Valid choices are none, url (encode for use in links), and entity (encode using HTML escape codes). Default is entity encoding.
flastmod - Display datestamp of file
file
docroot
virtual
fsize - Display file size
file
docroot
virtual
printenv - Print all enviornment (if enabled) and user variables.
set - Set user variable
var
Name of variable to set
value
What to set the variable to
config - Set SSI configuration options
sizefmt - Format for displaying file sizes with fsize
Choice of bytes (default) which prints the exact size in bytes, and abbrev which postfixes the numbers with K, M or G if the files are in the kilobyte/megabyte/gigabyte region.
errmsg - SSI error message
Default is There was an error processing this directive
timefmt - Format for flastmod timestamps
Uses strftime for time formatting. Default is %d/%m/%Y %H:%M%:%.
echomsg - Placeholder for undefined variables
Shown when echo is used with a nonexistant variable. Defaault is undefined
if - Conditional statement
expr
Conditional expression. It follow
elif - Conditional statement (else if)
expr
Conditional expression
else - Conditional statement
endif - Conditional statement
Requirements:
- cURL - Required to support the virtual parameter.
- POSIX Threads - Required for FastCGI
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