[cgiwrap-users] RE: Adding fastcgi support to cgiwrap...

[Neulinger, N. R. <nn...@um...>]

> > I have received some inquiries about the possibility of 
> adding fastcgi
> > support to cgiwrap. I am not very familiar with fastcgi. Is 
> this something
> > that could be reasonably accomplished, or is it worth the trouble?
> 
> FastCGI allows a CGI to run as a persistent process.  The web 
> server uses
> the FastCGI protocol over a socket to communicate with it.  
> The protocol
> support is provided in library specific to the application's 
> language and
> makes it pretty easy to convert existing CGI applications.
> 
> Wrapper support in mod_fastcgi is based Apache's suexec 
> model.  A User/Group
> is assigned to a VirtualHost.  The wrapper takes the name of 
> the CGI, user,
> and group as args.

With cgiwrap, the basic usage is the determine the script and user from the
URI. i.e.

/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/~nneul/info.pl

would run /users/nneul/public_html/cgi-bin/info.pl as nneul. There are other
approaches using ScriptAliases and rewriting, but they all boil down to the
same thing.

> I've made some suggests about how to use mod_fastcgi with the existing
> cgiwrap, but its unclear to me their status.  I haven't made 
> any attempt to
> use cgiwrap.

Ah, you're figuring to use it as a replacement for suexec. That's not quite
what I was thinking. One of the benefits of cgiwrap is that it is server
independent. (Not that anyone would ever want to use anything other than
apache of course....) I was wondering if it would be reasonable to put fcgi
support into cgiwrap, not add cgiwrap support to mod_fcgi.

> 2. Eliminate the dependency on Apache's use of this feature, 
> i.e. allow it
> the use FastCgiWrapper even when suexec isn't enabled in apache.
> 
> I'd be willing to do that if you would confirm that cgiwrap 
> will ignore the
> args and can work with environment its passed (it should look 
> just like the
> CGI environment under suexec).  I'd also appreciate a link or 
> some text that
> explains that it works, etc.

As long as it is passed a reasonable set of environment variables, it should
work ok. The problem is that people do not access cgiwrap scripts through
the document root. They access them via PATH_INFO added to cgiwrap call.

It's a real low priority for me, as I figure if you need the extra
performance that a fastcgi/mod_perl script gets you, you should just have a
dedicated server process running the scripts directly.

-- Nathan