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.
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
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>
Randal,
Thanks for pointing out. Sometime this kind of small problem makes me crazy :(