About nixCraft

Topics

Apache give each user their own cgi-bin directory

Posted by Vivek Gite [Last updated: January 19, 2006]

Apache has public_html directory support. With this you specify the name of the directory which is appended onto a user's home directory if a ~user request is received. For example http://domain.com/~rocky/file.html will be rocky's home directory /home/rocky/public_html/file.html. Recently I took small part time job to setup web server for university. I want to give every student access to cgi-bin so that they can use perl. I don't wanna give everyone access to /var/www/cgi-bin or /usr/lib/cgi-bin directory. ScriptAliases enables documents in the cgi-bin directory treated as applications and run by the server when requested rather than as documents sent to the client. So first I did setup ScriptAlias. However it was not working.
So all students was able to see each others perl source code :( so I was called again to fix this problem. After searching little bit, I found solution from offical Apache docs. So I modified httpd.conf and added following two directives to /home/*/public_html/cgi-bin section:

Options ExecCGI
SetHandler cgi-script

At the end final entry looked like as follows:

<Directory /home/*/public_html/cgi-bin>
Options ExecCGI
SetHandler cgi-script
</Directory>

Then I restarted apache and it worked like a charm. See Apache document Dynamic Content with CGI. Update: As pointed out by Randal you just need to add above four lines.

E-mail this to a Friend    Printable Version

You may also be interested in other helpful articles:

Discussion on This Article:

  1. Randal L. Schwartz Says:

    Doing it this way means that you can’t have ordinary files, because all executables are treated as CGI programs, and all non-executables are treated as 500 errors!

    Perhaps what you should have done is created a subdirectory under each public_html called “cgi-bin”.
    Then you could have added:

    <Directory /home/*/public_html/cgi-bin>
    Options ExecCGI
    SetHandler cgi-script
    </Directory>

  2. LinuxTitli Says:

    Randal,

    Thanks for pointing out. Sometime this kind of small problem makes me crazy :(

Leave a Reply

We encourage your comments, and suggestions. But please stay on topic, be polite, and avoid spam. Thank you very much for stopping by our site!

XHTML: You can use these tags: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>

Copyright © 2004-2008 nixCraft. All rights reserved - TOS/Disclaimer - Privacy policy - Powered by Open source software.