Lately, I had to quickly set up a small CGI running example. Here's how to do it.

1. Local Web root folder

If it does not exist, create a ~/Sites and a ~/Sites/cgi-bin folder.

Create a new file /etc/apache2/your-username.conf containing the following:

<Directory "/Users/your-username/Sites/cgi-bin/">  
    AllowOverride None
    Options ExecCGI
    AddHandler cgi-script .cgi .pl .tcl .py
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all
</Directory>

and set permissions to 644.

2. Apache extensions

Edit /etc/apache2/httpd.conf and de-comment the following modules:

LoadModule authz_core_module libexec/apache2/mod_authz_core.so  
LoadModule authz_host_module libexec/apache2/mod_authz_host.so  
LoadModule userdir_module libexec/apache2/mod_userdir.so

You need also to uncomment:

Include /private/etc/apache2/extra/httpd-userdir.conf

Finaly, edit /etc/apache2/extra/httpd-userdir.conf and uncomment

Include /private/etc/apache2/users/*.conf

3. Adding a CGI

Add an index.html in ~/Sites, e.g.:

<!DOCTYPE html>  
<html>  
    <head>
        <title>CGI showcase</title>
    </head>
    <body>
        <form action="cgi-bin/greeting.py" method="POST">
            <fieldset>
                <legend>Personal information:</legend>
                <label for="firstname">First name:
                <input type="text" name="firstname" placeholder="Guybrush" required="true"><br>
                <label for="lastname">Last name:
                <input type="text" name="lastname" placeholder="Threepwood" required="true">
                <br><br>
                <input type="submit" value="Submit">
            </fieldset>
        </form>
    </body>
</html>

Then, let us add a simple CGI script in Python as ~/Sites/cgi-bin/greeting.py:

#!/usr/bin/python
import cgi  
import os

def main():  
    form = cgi.FieldStorage()
    print "Content-type: text/html"
    print
    print "<html><head>"
    print "<title> Hi! </title>"
    print "</head><body>"
    print "Hi %s %s" % (form.getvalue("firstname"), form.getvalue("lastname"))
    # print "REQUEST_METHOD: %s" % os.environ['REQUEST_METHOD']
    print "</body></html>"
    return 0

if __name__ == '__main__':  
    main()

4. Lunching Apache

The only thing left is to start Apache:

sudo apachectl start

The Web app should be available at

http://localhost/~your-username

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