Having recently tried to search for the answer to this question, and found that one guy had partially answered the question on every post, here’s how to serve SSI / SHTML content through Grunt and Express.
The Grunt Task
Pretty straight forward, add connect with a server. Change the port and hostname as per your requirements. ‘express-keepalive’ keeps the Grunt task, and hence the server, running.
The server
Hopefully the gist below is self explanitory, we’re using connect-ssi as the wrapper for node-ssi. Be sure to add the dependencies to your package JSON.
Possible problem
When I came to use connect-ssi and node-ssi the includes didn’t work the same as in MAMP/WAMP. The definitions for the file and virtual declaration seem the wrong way around. I’ve forked node-ssi here if you’re having a similar issue.