Custom CGI Headers and Footers

Introduction

If you're doing custom installs of Nagios for clients, you may want to have a custom header and/or footer displayed in the output of the CGIs. This is particularly useful for displaying support contact information, etc. to the end user.

It is important to note that custom headers and footers are not processed in any way before they are displayed. The contents of the header and footer include files are simply read and displayed in the CGI output. That means they can only contain information a web browser can understand (HTML, JavaScript, etc.).

How Does It Work?

You can include custom headers and footers in the output of the CGIs by dropping some appropriately named HTML files in the ssi/ subdirectory of the Nagios HTML directory (i.e. /usr/local/nagios/share/ssi).

Custom headers are included immediately after the <BODY> tag in the CGI output. Similarly, customer headers are included immediately before the closing </BODY> tag.

There are two types of customer headers and footers:

Global headers/footers. These files should be named common-header.ssi and common-footer.ssi, respectively. If these files exist, they will be included in the output of all CGIs.
CGI-specific headers/footers. These files should be named in the format CGINAME-header.ssi and CGINAME-footer.ssi, where CGINAME is the physical name of the CGI without the .cgi extension. For example, the header and footer files for the alert summary CGI (summary.cgi) would be named summary-header.ssi and summary-footer.ssi, respectively.

You are not required to use any custom headers or footers. You can use only a global header if you wish. You can use only CGI-specific headers and a global footer if you wish. Whatever you want. Really.