Mac OS X Web sharing, .cgi scripts not executing: showing up as plain text

Alec Jacobson

March 26, 2011

weblog/

I wanted cgi scripts to be executed everywhere in the website I am hosting from a macbook pro. The default, is to have cgi script only execute inside /Library/Webserver/CGI-Executables and not in the main site /Library/Webserver/Documents. So if you have a test script saved in test.cgi:

#!/bin/bash
echo "Content-type: text/html";
echo "";
echo "Hello";

You can put it in /Library/Webserver/CGI-Executables. Then change its permissions:

chmod 755 test.cgi

And see the result at http://localhost/cgi-bin/test.cgi. If you want to have .cgi scripts run anywhere then you need to change your apache configuration (mine is located at /private/etc/apache2/httpd.conf ) Make sure this line is uncommented:

    AddHandler cgi-script .cgi

And be sure that ExecCGI is added to you options for the /Library/Webserver/Documents directory like this:

<Directory "/Library/WebServer/Documents">
    #
    # Possible values for the Options directive are "None", "All",
    # or any combination of:
    #   Indexes Includes FollowSymLinks SymLinksifOwnerMatch ExecCGI MultiViews
    #
    # Note that "MultiViews" must be named *explicitly* --- "Options All"
    # doesn't give it to you.
    #
    # The Options directive is both complicated and important.  Please see
    # http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/mod/core.html#options
    # for more information.
    #
    Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews +ExecCGI

    #
    # AllowOverride controls what directives may be placed in .htaccess files.
    # It can be "All", "None", or any combination of the keywords:
    #   Options FileInfo AuthConfig Limit
    #
    AllowOverride All

    #
    # Controls who can get stuff from this server.
    #
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all

</Directory>

Now if you move your test.cgi script to /Library/Webserver/Documents you should be able to see it in action at http://localhost/test.cgi. BUT for me the script just shows up in the browser in plain text. I searched and searched, but couldn't figure out what I'd done wrong. The answer was simple. Restart Apache. You can do this by opening System Preferences > Sharing and toggling off and on "Web Sharing". Now everything works great!