Serving Web Pages: CGI Integration

The ginger-cgi executable runs the GVM as a CGI script. You use it just like the ginger-script tool, except that the HTTP parameters are automatically read in and can be processed by the script.

CGI scripts access their environment in two ways:

  • Via environment variables. Use the ${variable} syntax to do that.

  • Via the request parameters. Use the cgiValue system function to request these.

Example script

Here’s a very simple “hello_world.cgi” script:

#!/usr/local/bin/ginger-cgi -gcommon

print( "Content-type: text/html\r\n\r\n" );
println( "Hello, %p!", cgiValue( "name" ) );

And here is the result:

steve% ./hello_world.cgi
Enter querystring or type 'i' for interactive mode'
name=Steve
Content-type: text/html

Hello, Steve!

Using Elements

One of the main uses of elements is generating XHTML output. For example, an HTML version of Hello World would look like this.

#!/usr/local/bin/ginger-cgi -gcommon

print( "Content-type: text/html\r\n\r\n" );
<html>
        <body>
                "Hello, %p!".stringf( cgiValue( "name" ) )
        </body>
</html>

Notice how the character data is represented by a string. In fact you can use any item, which will be printed out using XHTML escaping.

And here is the result:

steve% ./hello.cgi
Enter querystring or type 'i' for interactive mode'
name=Steve
Content-type: text/html

<html><body>Hello, Steve!</body></html>

Note that applying the print functions to an element will generate proper XHTML output with correctly escaped characters.

Future Enhancements

The CGI support is minimal at the time of writing. This is because our plans for enhancing this facility depend on a GVM feature that isn’t stable as yet, called