{tech}.Ben Buckman.net

I had to set up a local copy of an old site running (on the server) PHP 4 and hundreds of old-school SSIs (server-side includes), of the <!--#include variety. It took a bunch of time to get it right, but in the end it's pretty simple:

Make sure mod_include is enabled in your httpd.conf.
Have this directive in your httpd.conf (it should be possible in the virtualhost or .htaccess too but doesn't work there:

<Directory />
Options Includes
</Directory>

(It's possible the Directory can be other than root (/) -- I think the key is just to put it in httpd.conf.)
Also in httpd.conf, put the directive SetOutputFilter INCLUDES.

Prior to PHP 4.6 I think, there was a configuration directive --enable-track-vars which allowed SSI variables to work PHP, or something like that, but it's deprecated and built in now, so PHP can output SSI directives.

Make sure to restart Apache after adding this, of course.

If I run into other issues with this, I'll update this post; in the meantime, it seems to be working.

Apache's mod_rewrite module is most commonly used to generate clean URLs, by covertly "rewriting" incoming paths to different internal paths. (Drupal rewrites /some/url as index.php?q=some/url and works off the querystring, for example.) It can also be used to overtly redirect users with the same kind of rules. But mod_rewrite's flexibility allows it to be used for a whole lot more than simple URL handling. Regex patterns can be tested to set environment variables, for example (the kind retrieved with PHP's getenv(). I recently started using rewrite rules in my Drupal root .htaccess files as an alternative to my Environments module, for organizing all my server- and subdomain-differentiated logic in a central location. This functionality is documented reasonably well at Apache.org; see the "Documentation" section at the bottom. Here are some examples I'm using. They're all wrapped in: This sets environment variables for each server environment: Uncomment this for debugging: This rule redirects tech.benbuck.net to benbuckman.net/tech. It excludes my local and dev sites, redirects ([R]), and stops checking for other rules ([L]): This powers the "shortcut" URLs which I use to tweet my posts. !-f and !-d exclude valid file and directory paths, respectively. On a multi-site setup, RewriteRules can send /files to /sites/somesite/files based on the subdomain. (This only works for HTTP-requested paths, however; unlike symlinks, these rules have no effect on include()'d paths, for instance.) The next thing I'd like to try is virtual document roots (*.domain) that map to different folders. If you have any other cool mod_rewrite tips, or see any errors in my examples here, please post a comment!