CGI (Common Gateway Interface) was one of the first methods for serving dynamic content from web servers. When the web server gets a request to a CGI executable, it would invoke the executable and pass information about the request in environment variables and over standard input. The web page content would be printed over standard output and fed back to the user by the web server.
CGI feels like a very “unix-y” sort of design, but unfortunately it fell out of favor as more people started to use programming languages that were not precompiled or involved a higher startup/warmup cost (creating database connections, etc). To combat that, technologies such as FastCGI and SCGI were developed, which could be re-used for multiple requests. Inevitably, programming languages started implementing their own web servers and everything could be controlled in your application’s code.
One of the cool things about using processes is that you can write your code in a low level language and rely on system process cleanup to free the resources you allocate instead of worrying about memory leaks like you would in paradigms where your application stays alive for multiple requests. To handle database connection pooling more gracefully, you might look at something like PgBouncer, which allows you to pool connections while running a proxy agent on the local machine. Hare was my programming language of choice here as it’s a fairly simple and safe systems language that has no external dependencies (ldd says “not a dynamic executable”) and no garbage collection. Startup time is less than a millisecond.
Anyways, here is how I set up a fairly minimal Apache httpd which runs a Hare “Hello World” program. Based on the logs, I was generally seeing less than a 1 millisecond serve time for a Hare program through CGI and about 12ms serve time for running a Python3 hello program. Here is everything so that future me knows how to set it up again:
> find . -type f
./htdocs/index.html (static file)
./etc/httpd/httpd.conf (config, also run mkdir -p logs)
./cgi-bin/hello (compiled binary)
etc/http.conf:
ServerRoot "/home/timmy/src/hare-cgi"
ServerName localhost
Listen 8080
LimitRequestBody 102400
LoadModule authz_host_module modules/mod_authz_host.so
LoadModule authz_core_module modules/mod_authz_core.so
LoadModule env_module modules/mod_env.so
LoadModule unixd_module modules/mod_unixd.so
LoadModule dir_module modules/mod_dir.so
LoadModule alias_module modules/mod_alias.so
LoadModule log_config_module modules/mod_log_config.so
LoadModule cgid_module modules/mod_cgid.so
User timmy
DocumentRoot "/home/timmy/src/hare-cgi/htdocs"
DirectoryIndex index.html
ErrorLog "logs/error_log"
LogLevel warn
LogFormat "%h %l %u %t \"%r\" %>s %b %D" common
CustomLog "logs/access_log" common
ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ "/home/timmy/src/hare-cgi/cgi-bin/"
<Directory />
AllowOverride none
Require all denied
</Directory>
<Directory "/home/timmy/src/hare-cgi/htdocs">
AllowOverride None
Require all granted
</Directory>
<Directory "/home/timmy/src/hare-cgi/cgi-bin">
AllowOverride None
Options None
Require all granted
</Directory>
cmd/hello/main.ha:
use fmt;
use io;
use os;
use strings;
fn serve(in: str) void = {
fmt::println("Content-type: text/plain")!;
fmt::println("")!;
let uri = os::getenv("REQUEST_URI");
let qs = os::getenv("QUERY_STRING");
let accept = os::getenv("HTTP_ACCEPT");
let method = os::getenv("REQUEST_METHOD");
fmt::println("uri=", uri)!;
fmt::println("q=", qs)!;
fmt::println("method=", method)!;
fmt::println("accept=", accept)!;
fmt::println("in:")!;
fmt::println(in)!;
};
export fn main() void = {
let buf = io::drain(os::stdin)!;
serve(strings::fromutf8(buf)!);
};
The modules:
$ ls -ld modules
lrwxrwxrwx 1 timmy users 64 Jan 24 21:56 modules ->
/gnu/store/ijw3qrgxvfvi40y1vxysdazn983qxrh2-httpd-2.4.58/modules
``
Start the web server with: `httpd -d $(pwd) -DFOREGROUND`