Apache Server Side Includes (SSI)

I have an ancient website on a shared hosting server ... one of those cheap deals that offers you a public_html sub-folder on a VM. Recently I needed to make some changes so copied the site across to a newer server. Everything was easy to set up, set for the life of me I couldn't get Server-side Includes (SSI) to work. This is pretty old technology, and I could have moved them into a different framework but I didn't have the time.

The steps that eventually sorted it were:

• enable mod-include
• update Options to include "+Include"
• if you're using .html rather than .shtml then also set "XBitHack On"

I wasn't getting any errors with this yet still the includes weren't working. I knew the file attributes must be right as they were copied from the working site. As this was a newer version of Apache I also added the 'Require all granted' in case that was the issue, but in the end it was this server fault entry finally sorted the problem -

if you are going to serve SSI via HTML you need to tell Apache that's your intention:

 AddHandler server-parsed .html
 AddType text/html .html
 AddOutputFilter INCLUDES .html