slamet has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I cannot find any documentation on how to get CGI going on OpenBSD 5.6 httpd. (Starting with 5.6, OpenBSD ships its own http daemon.) And I am a newbie with CGI. I have something like the following: hello 
!#/usr/bin/perl

print "Content type: text/html";
print "hello world";

[download]
I have done "chmod 755 hello", but when I call the address 
curl localhost/hello

[download]
I got the whole file content, instead of just "hello world". I have poured over manpages for httpd and httpd.conf, but still cannot fix this. Many thanks for your help.

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: CGI on OpenBSD 5.6 httpd
by poj (Abbot) on Dec 21, 2014 at 11:45 UTC

    Line 1 - Change !# to #!
    Line 2 - add \n\n

    #!/usr/bin/perl

print "Content type: text/html\n\n";
print "hello world";

    [download]
    Move the script to the cgi-bin folder and try curl localhost/cgi-bin/hello
    poj
[reply]
[d/l]
[select]
Re: CGI on OpenBSD 5.6 httpd
by Corion (Patriarch) on Dec 21, 2014 at 11:24 UTC

    Are you sure that curl localhost/hello will contact your http server?

    I would try curl http://localhost/hello.

    Still, your webserver does not seem to be set up to treat hello as a CGI file. Maybe naming the file hello.cgi would help, if the webserver by default is set up to treat executable files named .cgi as programs producing output.

[reply]
[d/l]
[select]
Re: CGI on OpenBSD 5.6 httpd
by Anonymous Monk on Dec 21, 2014 at 11:52 UTC
    I cannot find any documentation on how to get CGI going on OpenBSD 5.6 httpd.
    That's right, httpd by itself doesn't do plain cgi (only fastcgi). You need slowcgi(8).
[reply]
Re: CGI on OpenBSD 5.6 httpd
by slamet (Initiate) on Jan 03, 2015 at 01:14 UTC

    Thanks for all the input. I fixed the typo on #!, renamed the file name, created cgi-bin dir under the chroot dir (and both have permission mode 755).

    Re comment on "curl localhost/..", what I meant was "curl http://ip address/..".

    Re slowcgi, according to the manpage, it actually is the implementation of fastcgi. :-)

    I suspect there is something on httpd.conf that I am missing, but I copied it from the manpage. 

    prefork 2 
 
server "default" { 
    listen on egress port 80 
} 
 
types { 
    text/css            css 
    text/html            htm html 
    text/txt            txt 
    image/gif            gif 
    image/jpeg            jpg jpeg 
    image/png            png 
    application/javascript        js 
    application/xml            xml 
}

    [download]

    All in all, I am still stuck.

[reply]
[d/l]
      Re slowcgi, according to the manpage, it actually is the implementation of fastcgi. :-)
      No.
      All in all, I am still stuck.
      httpd doesn't do CGI.
[reply]

        Actually it does and it has a good sense of humour for the name.

        http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi/OpenBSD-current/man5/httpd.conf.5

        Anyway, I just found this blog post. Thanks to all who responded to my inquiry.

        http://www.protoc.org/blog/2014/11/23/first-thoughts-on-the-new-openbsd-httpd-server/

        Cheers

[reply]

Back to Seekers of Perl Wisdom