Operation Manual

Example 20.5:

VirtualHost CGI Conguration

ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ "/srv/www/www.example.com/cgi-bin/"

Options +ExecCGI

AddHandler cgi-script .cgi .pl

Order allow,deny

Allow from all

</Directory>

Tells Apache to handle all les within this directory as CGI scripts.

Enables CGI script execution

Tells the server to treat les with the extensions .pl and .cgi as CGI scripts. Adjust

according to your needs.

The Order and Allow directives control the default access state and the order

in which allow and deny directives are evaluated. In this case “allow” statements

are evaluated before “deny” statements and universal access is enabled.

20.5.2 Running an Example Script

CGI programming differs from "regular" programming in that the CGI programs and

scripts must be preceded by a MIME-Type header such as Content-type:

text/html. This header is sent to the client, so it understands what kind of content

it receives. Secondly, the script's output must be something the client, usually a Web

browser, understands—HTML in most cases or plain text or images, for example.

A simple test script available under /usr/share/doc/packages/apache2/

test-cgi is part of the Apache package. It outputs the content of some environment

variables as plain text. Copy this script to either /srv/www/cgi-bin/ or the script

directory of your virtual host (/srv/www/www.example.com/cgi-bin/) and

name it test.cgi.

Files accessible by the Web server should be owned by the user root. For additional

information see Section 20.7, “Avoiding Security Problems” (page 397). Because the

Web server runs with a different user, the CGI scripts must be world-executable and

world-readable. Change into the CGI directory and use the command chmod 755

test.cgi to apply the proper permissions.

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