March 2003
Beginner
432 pages
11h 30m
English
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Turning on CGI
CGI scripts allow you to serve up dynamic content on your web site using a Unix-based scripting language like Perl.
It’s now time to fiddle with the most commonly used way of generating dynamic content and serving it up on your web server. We’re talking about Common Gateway Interface (CGI). Without getting overly esoteric, CGI allows us to install thousands of different scripts that can be accessed through a normal web browser. CGI scripts are most often written in a Unix scripting language like Perl, Python, or Ruby. They can allow users to access databases, use interactive forms, chat in bulletin boards, and so on.
Apache comes with two simple scripts that can verify CGI is
configured correctly. Before we test them, however,
we’ve got to poke around our
httpd.conf
file a bit. As mentioned earlier [Hack #89], the
easiest way to find out more about a feature is simply to search for
the term in question. These are all the relevant matches
we’ll find in our httpd.conf
for CGI:
LoadModule cgi_module libexec/httpd/mod_cgi.so AddModule mod_cgi.c ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ "/Library/WebServer/CGI-Executables/" <Directory "/Library/WebServer/CGI-Executables"> AllowOverride None Options None Order allow,deny Allow from all </Directory> # AddHandler cgi-script .cgi
We’ve already described the first two lines [Hack #89], but the
ScriptAlias
directive allows us
to map a URL to a location on our hard drive. In this case, Apache is
mapping http://127.0.0.1/cgi-bin/ to the
/Library/WebServer/CGI-Executables/ ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.