In an SSI include, can the file being included be redirected in an .htaccess file

.htaccessapache-2.2redirectserver-side-includes

I have some old html pages that have SSI includes in them to include certain html in all the pages.

So, the SSI looks something like this:

<!--#include virtual="/includes/noNav/footercode.html"-->

But I want to move that included file from /includes/noNav/footercode.html to /includes/footercode.html so I implemented a redirect in an .htaccess file like this:

# Redirect permanent /includes/noNav/footercode.html  http://intranet.myorg.org/includes/footercode.html

But now I get errors saying "unable to include "/includes/noNav/footercode.html" in parsed file" So, do redirects not work on included files?

Also, if I browse directly to the old path, it will correctly redirect me. But it fails if the path is included.

Best Answer

The SSI is parsed as part of the apache SSI module and does not make web requests back to Apache in order to retrieve the file. As it does not use HTTP back to Apache to retrieve the files specified by #include, no rewrite or redirect rules are applied.

The virtual= directive finds a file starting at ServerRoot, while the file= directive finds a file in the same directory as the current page.

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Vanity URL manager for Apache Web Server

I don't know what exactly defines a "maintenance nightmare" in your book, but you could try to go with a dynamic rewriting map in apache:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteMap    vanity-map       prg:/path/to/vanity.pl
RewriteRule   ^/(.*)/(.*)$  /${vanity-map:$1}/$2

vanity.pl could could be a simple perl script (don't forget to set $| = 1;) which gets the first part of the request URL (as outlined above) on STDIN and is supposed to rewrite that - e.g. by querying a database.

Now, that just leaves the frontend. I'm an inexperienced Ruby on Rails programmer (it's just a spare time activity), but I think, if it doesn't need to look pretty, even I could write an application that authenticates a user, lets him create a rewriting and shows that up for approval to some IT guys/$WHATEVER in much less than a week, so I don't think any real programmer would have a problem doing that in a few hours. Depending on the database, there might even be frontends readily available which will do the job with only a little customization (php*admin comes to my mind).

This way, you get all the flexibility of a database approach paired with a central source for all redirections. As long as the database's index on the URL part fits in your servers memory, you won't even have to worry about performance.

Apache: Include Virtual SSI not working for CGI script

My hosting company escalated the issue to cPanel, and to my embarrassment, it ended up being a setting in my .htaccess file that was missing after all.

The account that was working had this line, where the broken account, did not...

Options All -Indexes

All, by default, includes what the hosting company added in order to get it working...

Options +Includes +ExecCGI

Without +ExecCGI, it breaks as I described in my original posting.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Vanity URL manager for Apache Web Server

Apache: Include Virtual SSI not working for CGI script

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