Apache: The Definitive Guide, 3rd Edition

Script in DocumentRoot

The other method is to put scripts in among the HTML files. You should only do this if you trust the authors of the site to write safe scripts (or not write them at all) since security is much reduced. Generally speaking, it is safer to use a separate directory for scripts, as explained previously. First, it means that people writing HTML can’t accidentally or deliberately cause security breaches by including executable code in the web tree. Second, it makes life harder for the Bad Guys: often it is necessary to allow fairly wide access to the nonexecutable part of the tree, but more careful control can be exercised on the CGI directories.

We would not suggest you do this unless you absolutely have to. But regardless of these good intentions, we put mycgi.cgi in.../site.cgi/htdocs. The Config file, ... /site.cgi/conf/httpd2.conf, is now:

User webuser
Group webgroup
ServerName www.butterthlies.com
DocumentRoot /usr/www/APACHE3/site.cgi/htdocs
AddHandler cgi-script cgi
Options  

ExecCGI

Use Addhandler to set a handler type of cgi-script with the extension .cgi. This means that any document Apache comes across with the extension.cgi will be taken to be an executable script.You put the CGI scripts, called <name>.cgi in your document root. You also need to have Options ExecCGI . To run this one, type the following:

./go 2

You would access this script by browsing to http://www.butterthlies.com/cgi-bin/mycgi.cgi.

To experiment, we have a simple test script, mycgi.cgi ...