Sometimes I want to fire up a websever for a particular directory just to test some scripts. It is a real pain to set up apache for this as it involves editing the httpd.conf file or moving the test files to another directory.

I have searched for some small webservers that can do CGI and can be started with just a command line. I have found a partial answer in mini_httpd. Running something like mini_httpd -p 8080 -c '**.pl' will start a server which uses the current directory as its base, it will listen on port 8080 and will treat anything ending in .pl as a CGI script.

Unfortunately there does not appear to be sensible error logging so a special line is required at the top of each script: 

#!/usr/bin/perl

open STDERR, ">>errors"
    if $ENV{SERVER_SOFTWARE} =~ m/^mini_httpd/;

use strict;
use warnings;

use CGI::Carp;
use CGI;

warn "This is a warning";

print CGI->header;
print "Hello";
print "<br>$_ : $ENV{$_}\n" for keys %ENV;

[download]

Does anyone have a solution to this problem. I want to start a server from the command line that lets me test scripts. Obviously this server will be very simple, only just enough for CGI scripts.

This is the list of servers I scanned to find mini_httpd.

--tidiness is the memory loss of environmental mnemonics

In reply to Simple command line web server for running cgis. by EvdB

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