CGI method

The embedded web server supports the Common Gateway Interface (CGI) 1.1, a readily available means of handling dynamic data. The downside of CGI is that it's resource-heavy because it often involves an interpreted language.

If you're using the CGI method, you need to decide where to locate your cgi-bin directory, which contains all your CGI scripts.

To tell the embedded web server that you want to use the CGI method, you need to use the HTTPD_SCRIPTALIAS environment variable to tell it where to find the CGI scripts and executables. For example:

export HTTPD_SCRIPTALIAS=/usr/www/cgi-bin

If you define HTTPD_SCRIPTALIAS, anybody can run scripts or processes that reside in that directory on your machine. Therefore, make sure you create a separate directory for these scripts to reside in. Not defining HTTPD_SCRIPTALIAS turns CGI functionality off, causing all CGI requests to fail.

CAUTION:

Don't use /bin or /usr/bin as your CGI directory. Don't place any sensitive files in the cgi-bin directory, because doing so exposes them to anyone who uses the web server.

Make sure that the files in the cgi-bin directory can be executable by anybody, but modifiable only by root, by running chmod 755 on the files in the directory.

For example, suppose HTTPD_SCRIPTALIAS contains /usr/www/cgi-bin as the name of the directory. If Slinger gets a request for the resource www.qnx.com/cgi-bin/get_data.cgi/foo, the get_data.cgi script found in /usr/www/cgi-bin is executed, and foo is sent as pathname information to get_data.cgi. The foo directory is stored in the PATH_INFO environment variable, which is used to send extra path information.

Slinger sets several environment variables, which can be used by CGI scripts. For more information, see slinger in the Utilities Reference.