Question

I found the following htacess that allows concatenation from within specific js files

<FilesMatch "\.combined\.js$">
  Options +Includes
  AddOutputFilterByType INCLUDES application/javascript application/json
  SetOutputFilter INCLUDES
</FilesMatch>

e.g. Inside of script.combined.js you could have

 < !--#include file="libs/jquery-1.5.0.min.js" -->
 < !--#include file="plugins/jquery.idletimer.js" -->

and they would be included into this single file.

I want to know how do these two line – line 2 n 3 of the .htaccess combine files.

Also these have worked on several systems but on my ubuntu 12.04 with Apache 2.2.22 they don’t work. why?

Answer 1

The first line enables Includes also known as SSI (server-side includes) for the two mime types: application/javascript and application/json

The second line SetOutputFilter INCLUDES processes the files for includes before outputing them but only for the files contained in the regex path "\.combined\.js$" and basically does what the first is doing but it’s a backup.

Your missing a crucial Option flag. And that’s Options +Includes to enable includes to begin with. That may be why it is not working on the other server

I hope your not including that space after the < and it was a typo because surely that will not work on any version of apache if I’m not mistaken. It should be without spaces as follows:

<!--#include file="libs/jquery-1.5.0.min.js" -->
<!--#include file="plugins/jquery.idletimer.js" -->

You will also need to enable mod_include module in your Apache httpd.conf. http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/mod/mod_include.html

LoadModule include_module modules/mod_include.so

I’m pretty sure you got this code from the HTML5-Boilerplate .htaccess

https://github.com/h5bp/html5-boilerplate/blob/master/dist/.htaccess#L887-L917