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11.2 Testing Whether CGI Is Working

Credit: Jeff Bauer

11.2.1 Problem

You want a simple CGI program to use as a starting point for your own CGI programming or to test if your setup is functioning properly.

11.2.2 Solution

The cgi module is normally used in Python CGI programming, but here we use only its escape function to ensure that the value of an environment variable doesn't accidentally look to the browser as HTML markup. We do all of the real work ourselves: 

#!/usr/local/bin/python
print "Content-type: text/html"
print
print "<html><head><title>Situation snapshot</title></head><body><pre>"

import sys
sys.stderr = sys.stdout

import os
from cgi import escape
print "<strong>Python %s</strong>" % sys.version
keys = os.environ.keys(  )
keys.sort(  )
for k in keys:
    print "%s\t%s" % (escape(k), escape(os.environ[k]))
print "</pre></body></html>"

11.2.3 Discussion

The Common Gateway Interface (CGI) is a protocol that specifies how a web server runs a separate program (often known as a CGI script) that generates a web page dynamically. The protocol specifies how the server provides input and environment data to the script and how the script generates output in return. You can use any language to write your CGI scripts, and Python is well-suited for the task.

This recipe is a simple CGI program that displays the current version of Python and the environment values. CGI programmers should always have some simple code handy to drop into their cgi-bin directories. You should run this script before wasting time slogging through your Apache configuration files (or whatever other web server you want to use for CGI work). Of course, cgi.test does all this and more, but it may, in fact, do too much. It does so much, and so much is hidden inside cgi's innards, that it's hard to tweak it to reproduce whatever specific problems you may be encountering in true scripts. Tweaking the program in this recipe, on the other hand, is very easy, since it's such a simple program, and all the parts are exposed.

Besides, this little script is already quite instructive in its own way. The starting line, #!/usr/local/bin/python, must give the absolute path to the Python interpreter with which you want to run your CGI scripts, so you may need to edit it accordingly. A popular solution for non-CGI scripts is to have a first line (the so-called "shebang line") that looks something like this: 

#!/usr/bin/env python

However, this puts you at the mercy of the PATH environment setting, since it runs the first program named python it finds on the PATH, and that probably is not what you want under CGI, where you don't fully control the environment. Incidentally, many web servers implement the shebang line even when you run them under non-Unix systems, so that, for CGI use specifically, it's not unusual to see Python scripts on Windows start with a first line such as: 

#!c:/python22/python.exe

Another issue you may be contemplating is why the import statements are not right at the start of the script, as is the usual Python style, but are preceded by a few print statements. The reason is that import could fail if the Python installation is terribly misconfigured. In case of failure, Python will emit diagnostics to standard error (which is typically directed to your web server logs, depending, of course, on how you set up and configured your web server), and nothing will go to standard output. The CGI standard demands that all output be on standard output, so, we first ensure that a minimal quantity of output will display a result to a visiting browser. Then, assuming that import sys succeeds (if it fails, the whole installation and configuration is so badly broken that there's very little you can do about it!), you immediately make the following assignment: 

sys.stderr = sys.stdout

This ensures that error output will also go to standard output, and you'll have a chance to see it in the visiting browser. You can perform other import operations or do further work in the script only when this is done. In Python 2.2, getting useful tracebacks for errors in CGI scripts is much simpler. Simply add the following at the start of your script: 

import cgitb; cgitb.enable()

and the new standard module cgitb takes care of the rest

Just about all known browsers let you get away with skipping most of the HTML tags that this script outputs, but why skimp on correctness, relying on the browser to patch your holes? It costs little to emit correct HMTL, so you should get into the habit of doing things right, when the cost is so modest.

11.2.4 See Also

Documentation of the standard library module cgi in the Library Reference; a basic introduction to the CGI protocol is available at http://hoohoo.ncsa.uiuc.edu/cgi/overview.html.

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