Johan Klinge's picture
Johan Klinge - Mon, 2010/02/08 - 12:40

Hi,

I'm a newbie to Turnkey and have just set up LAMP as a virtual development environment for a website I support. Everything works great, except that the website uses cgi programs and I want to configure LAMP to run them. The cgi scripts are in directory /var/www/SITENAME/privat.  

Reading some other posts on the forum I changed the configuration for the default apache site to:

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost
 DocumentRoot /var/www/
 <Directory "/var/www/SITENAME/privat/">
  Options +ExecCGI
  AddHandler cgi-script .cgi
 </Directory>
LogLevel error
</VirtualHost>

But when running cgi script from the browser I get a 500 Internal Server Error and the apache logs says:

[error] [client IP] (2)No such file or directory: exec of '/var/www/SITENAME/privat/index.cgi' failed, referer: http://IP/SITENAME/
[Mon Feb 08 10:20:18 2010]
[error] [client IP] Premature end of script headers: index.cgi, referer: http://IP/SITENAME/

Any suggestions as to what I'm doing wrong would be appreciated.

Regards, /Johan

Forum: 
Support
Tags: 
lamp
apache
cgi
Andrew Stewart's picture

Andrew Stewart - Wed, 2010/12/08 - 00:24

Having this issue as well.  Why doesn't CGI work out of the box on LAMP?

Alon Swartz's picture

Alon Swartz - Thu, 2010/12/16 - 22:37
I've just tested cgi on LAMP and it works, but requires a minor tweak. I've updated the upcoming 11.0 release to include this tweak, as well as a test cgi script for reference.
 

Test CGI script

/var/www/cgi-bin/test.cgi
#!/usr/bin/perl
print "Content-type: text/html\n\n" ;
print <<EOF ;
<html>
<head><title>CGI Test</title></head>
<body>
<h1>Hello, world.</h1>
</body>
</html>
EOF
Don't forget to make the cgi script executable:
chmod +x /var/www/cgi-bin/test.cgi
 

Tell apache about cgi-bin

/etc/apache2/sites-available/default
NameVirtualHost *:80
NameVirtualHost *:443

<VirtualHost *:80>
        ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost
        DocumentRoot /var/www/
</VirtualHost>

<VirtualHost *:443>
        SSLEngine on
        SSLCertificateFile /etc/ssl/certs/cert.pem
        ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost
        DocumentRoot /var/www/
</VirtualHost>

ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ /var/www/cgi-bin/

<Directory /var/www/>
        Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
        Order allow,deny
        allow from all
</Directory>
Don't forget to restart apache after making the change:
/etc/init.d/apache2 restart
OR
service apache2 restart
 
As a side note, if you have a cgi script outside of the ScriptAlias that you want to be executable, you need to specify:
AddHandler cgi-script cgi
Options +ExecCGI
 
I hope the helps.
olc's picture

olc - Sun, 2010/12/19 - 17:01

This was the missing part of the puzzle and it did solve our problems. THANKS A LOT!

Jeremy Davis's picture

Jeremy Davis - Wed, 2011/04/06 - 02:11

This thread is quite old. See Alon's comment above:

I've updated the upcoming 11.0 release to include this tweak, as well as a test cgi script for reference.

Jeremy Davis's picture

Jeremy Davis - Tue, 2016/11/01 - 10:10
This thread is really old and things have changed a lot since this was relevant so it's not a huge surprise that it's not useful.

However, it should "just work"! But you are right. I just tested it and confirmed that it doesn't!

I have lodged an issue on our tracker.

[update] Here's the specifics to get the example cgi script working.

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