Any file that has the handler
cgi-script
will be treated
as a CGI script, and run by the server, with its output being
returned to the client. Files acquire this handler either by
having a name containing an extension defined by the
For an introduction to using CGI scripts with Apache, see our tutorial on Dynamic Content With CGI.
When using a multi-threaded MPM under unix, the module
For backward-compatibility, the cgi-script handler will also be activated
for any file with the mime-type application/x-httpd-cgi
. The
use of the magic mime-type is deprecated.
The server will set the CGI environment variables as described in the CGI specification, with the following provisions:
off
. The default behavior, if
/more/path/info
following the script filename in the URI),
while the core server will return a 404 NOT FOUND error for requests
with additional path info. Omitting the On
for on
(it
is off by default), and if a reverse DNS lookup of the accessing
host's address indeed finds a host name.on
and the accessing host supports the ident
protocol. Note that the contents of this variable cannot be
relied upon because it can easily be faked, and if there is a
proxy between the client and the server, it is usually
totally useless.This module also leverages the core functions ap_add_common_vars and ap_add_cgi_vars to add environment variables like:
For an exhaustive list it is suggested to write a basic CGI script that dumps all the environment variables passed by Apache in a convenient format.
Debugging CGI scripts has traditionally been difficult, mainly because it has not been possible to study the output (standard output and error) for scripts which are failing to run properly. These directives provide more detailed logging of errors when they occur.
When configured, the CGI error log logs any CGI which does not execute properly. Each CGI script which fails to operate causes several lines of information to be logged. The first two lines are always of the format:
If the error is that CGI script cannot be run, the log file will contain an extra two lines:
Alternatively, if the error is the result of the script returning incorrect header information (often due to a bug in the script), the following information is logged:
(The %stdout and %stderr parts may be missing if the script did not output anything on standard output or standard error).
This directive limits the length of time to wait for more output from the CGI program. If the time is exceeded, the request and CGI are terminated.
The
This log will be opened as the user the child processes run
as, i.e. the user specified in the main
Note that script logging is meant to be a debugging feature when writing CGI scripts, and is not meant to be activated continuously on running servers. It is not optimized for speed or efficiency, and may have security problems if used in a manner other than that for which it was designed.
The size of any PUT or POST entity body that is logged to the file is limited, to prevent the log file growing too big too quickly if large bodies are being received. By default, up to 1024 bytes are logged, but this can be changed with this directive.