JSP directive is a mechanism to pass message to JSP container. JSP directive does not produce an output to the page. But it communicates with JSP container.

E.g. <%@include ..%> directive is used for telling JSP container to include the content of another file during translation of JSP.

There can be zero or more attributes in a directive to pass additional information to JSP container.

Some of the important directives in JSP are: page, include and taglib.