How to run CGI scripts on Nginx

perl nginx cgi centos
Askhat picture Askhat · Jul 26, 2012 · Viewed 58.8k times · Source

I have problem setting up CGI scripts to be run on Nginx, so far I've found http://wiki.nginx.org/SimpleCGI this stuff but problem is that I can't make perl script run as service so that it will run in background and even in case of restart it will start running automatically

Do you have any idea? I'm running Centos 5

I've found some solutions here but I couldn't integrate code given there with this Perl script I'm completely zero at Perl, please help me Thanks

Answer

David Farrell picture David Farrell · Jul 26, 2012

Nginx doesn't have native CGI support (it supports fastCGI instead). The typical solution for this is to run your Perl script as a fastCGI process and edit the nginx config file to re-direct requests to the fastCGI process. This is quite a complex solution if all you want to do is run a CGI script.

Do you have to use nginx for this solution? If all you want to do is execute some Perl CGI scripts, consider using Apache or Lighttpd as they come with CGI modules which will process your CGI scripts natively and don't require the script to be run as a separate process. To do this you need install the web server and edit the web server config file to load the CGI module. For Lighttpd, you will need to add a line in the config file to enable processing of CGI files. Then put the CGI files into the cgi-bin folder.

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