Apache give each user their own cgi-bin directory
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.
You may also be interested in other helpful articles:
- Howto Setup Active Directory Authentication With Apache WebServer
- How to: Apache authentication using LDAP Server
- Apache httpd debugging Logs on steroids
- Shell scripting: Reading a root password with su-to-root shell script
- Configure an Apache web server for core dump on segmentation faults
Discussion on This Article:
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!
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