The London Perl and Raku Workshop takes place on 26th Oct 2024. If your company depends on Perl, please consider sponsoring and/or attending.

NAME

Plack::App::CGIBin - cgi-bin replacement for Plack servers

SYNOPSIS

use Plack::App::CGIBin;
use Plack::Builder;

my $app = Plack::App::CGIBin->new(root => "/path/to/cgi-bin")->to_app;
builder {
    mount "/cgi-bin" => $app;
};

# Or from the command line
plackup -MPlack::App::CGIBin -e 'Plack::App::CGIBin->new(root => "/path/to/cgi-bin")->to_app'

DESCRIPTION

Plack::App::CGIBin allows you to load CGI scripts from a directory and convert them into a PSGI application.

This would give you the extreme easiness when you have bunch of old CGI scripts that is loaded using cgi-bin of Apache web server.

HOW IT WORKS

This application checks if a given file path is a perl script and if so, uses CGI::Compile to compile a CGI script into a sub (like ModPerl::Registry) and then run it as a persistent application using CGI::Emulate::PSGI.

If the given file is not a perl script, it executes the script just like a normal CGI script with fork & exec. This is like a normal web server mode and no performance benefit is achieved.

The default mechanism to determine if a given file is a Perl script is as follows:

  • Check if the filename ends with .pl. If yes, it is a Perl script.

  • Open the file and see if the shebang (first line of the file) contains the word perl (like #!/usr/bin/perl). If yes, it is a Perl script.

You can customize this behavior by passing exec_cb callback, which takes a file path to its first argument.

For example, if your perl-based CGI script uses lots of global variables and such and are not ready to run on a persistent environment, you can do:

my $app = Plack::App::CGIBin->new(
    root => "/path/to/cgi-bin",
    exec_cb => sub { 1 },
)->to_app;

to always force the execute option for any files.

AUTHOR

Tatsuhiko Miyagawa

SEE ALSO

Plack::App::File CGI::Emulate::PSGI CGI::Compile Plack::App::WrapCGI

See also Plack::App::WrapCGI if you compile one CGI script into a PSGI application without serving CGI scripts from a directory, to remove overhead of filesystem lookups, etc.