Apache Cookbook, 2nd Edition

5.6. Creating a CGI Directory for Each User

Problem

You want each user to have their own cgi-bin directory rather than giving them all access to the main server CGI directory.

Solution

Put this in your httpd.conf:

<Directory "/home/*/public_html/cgi-bin/">
    Options ExecCGI
    SetHandler cgi-script
</Directory>
ScriptAliasMatch "/~([^/]+)/cgi-bin/(.*)" "/home/$1/public_html/cgi-bin/$2"

Discussion

You can’t use ScriptAlias in this case, because for each user, the first argument to ScriptAlias would be different. The <Directory> container and the ScriptAliasMatch directive are functionally equivalent.

This recipe lets each user put CGI scripts in her own personal Web space. Files accessed via URLs starting with:

http://www.example.com/~username/cgi-bin/

are treated as CGI scripts.

If you have suexec enabled, CGI programs run from this target directory will be run with the user ID of the user specified in the URL. For example, a CGI program accessed via the URL http://www.example.com/~rbowen/cgi-bin/example.cgi would be run as the user rbowen.

Warning

Allowing users to set up their own scripts to be automatically executed without some sort of review is asking for trouble, either from malicious users (perish the thought!) or exploitable insecure scripts.

See Also

• Recipe 8.1