Welcome to

CGI.TCNJ.EDU

at

The College of New Jersey

The main College website can be found at www.TCNJ.EDU.

Purpose

This is the web server that runs the CGI programs that members of the campus community program. It is separate from www.TCNJ.EDU so that a rogue CGI program can't take down the entire web site.

First and Foremost

You should make sure that any CGI program you run or write is security conscious. If you don't understand the source code, don't run it. A poorly written CGI program can crash the server, and carelessly written CGI programs can breach system security. If you aren't familiar with CGI security concerns, buy a book on UNIX CGI programming and read it, twice! If you still don't understand, don't put CGI programs on the system.

How to Use It

You should first setup your account for general web page serving. This means you need to setup the proper permissions on your home directory and "www" directory. Connect to beast.tcnj.edu, login and run the wwwsetup program if necessary.

Now you need to setup a "cgi-bin" directory to store your programs. For security reasons, this directory needs to be made at the top of your home directory, NOT in your "www" directory. These steps will create this directory in your home directory (on the same level as "www") and setup the proper permissions for it:

cd

mkdir cgi-bin

chmod 711 cgi-bin

You can now put your CGI programs in the "cgi-bin" directory. For Perl and other non-compiled CGI programs, you need to set the permissions on them with the following command:

chmod 755 your_cgi_program

of course, replace your_cgi_program with the name of the CGI program you put in that directory.

If you have a compiled CGI program, such as one written in C or C++, the above command will work, but to be even more security conscious, use this instead:

chmod 511 your_cgi_program

Now you can create a URL to your new CGI program. In the example, I will use "ssivy" as the user's account name and "counter.cgi" as the name of the CGI program. Substitute your account name and CGI program appropriately.

http://cgi.tcnj.edu/~ssivy/counter.cgi

NOTE: Your CGI program MUST end with .cgi no matter what language it was written in.

How It Works

Just like how www.TCNJ.EDU serves web pages out of your "www" directory, cgi.TCNJ.EDU serves CGI programs out of your "cgi-bin" directory. The way it tells a CGI program from a regular web page is by the .cgi file extension.

Using Server-Side Includes (SSI) on cgi.TCNJ.EDU

Simply create a web page with a .shtml suffix in your cgi-bin directory and include the SSI directives you want.

Using PHP 5.0 on cgi.TCNJ.EDU

Simply create a web page with a .php suffix in your cgi-bin directory and include the PHP 5.0 code you want in your page.

References

Here are some additional references on CGI programming.

CGI Programming on the World Wide Web, published by O'Reilly & Associates, Inc.
Programming Perl, 2nd Edition, published by O'Reilly & Associates, Inc.