Enabling CGI in Mac OS X with Apache

[Shuraski]

Is anyone experienced at enabling CGI using XAMPP for Mac OS X? I would like to use perl to execute scripts from cgi-bin/ -- for example, those contained in this bioinformatics book. However, after reading and rereading the on-line manuals, I continue to get:

Error 403 Access forbidden! You don't have permission to access the requested object. It is either read-protected or not readable by the server.

Which tells me this is a permissions issue.

I believe my permissions are correct:

In cgi-bin/

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root admin 43 Jan 28 07:06 form_query.pl

In the error_log:

in error_log: Options ExecCGI is off in this directory/Applications/XAMPP/xamppfiles/cgi-bin/form_query.pl

So, I go to httpd.conf to turn ExecCGI on:

Lines from httpd.conf file:

ScriptAliasMatch ^/cgi-bin/((?!(?i:webobjects)).*$) "/Library/WebServe +r/CGI-Executables/$1"


AddHandler cgi-script .cgi .pl
# "/Library/WebServer/CGI-Executables" should be changed to whatever y +our ScriptAliased # CGI directory exists, if you have that configured. # <Directory "/Library/WebServer/CGI-Executables"> AllowOverride None Options ExecCGI Order allow,deny Allow from all </Directory>


That did not work, so I tried enabling CGI in the directory that my cgi executable files are in:

<Directory "/Applications/XAMPP/xamppfiles/cgi-bin/">
AllowOverride None
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews ExecCGI
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Directory>


But still the 403 error persists

Could the problem be here? When calling ls -l in the XAMPP directory:

drwxr-xr-x 3 user admin 102 Aug 16 07:35 XAMPP Control.app
lrwxr-xr-x 1 user admin 18 Sep 27 09:49 cgi-bin -> xamppfiles/cgi-bin
lrwxr-xr-x@ 1 user admin 14 Sep 27 09:49 etc -> xamppfiles/etc
lrwxr-xr-x 1 user admin 17 Sep 27 09:49 htdocs -> xamppfiles/htdocs
lrwxr-xr-x@ 1 user admin 15 Sep 27 09:49 logs -> xamppfiles/logs
drwxr-xr-x@ 23 root admin 782 Aug 16 07:36 xamppfiles


Is there a problem with the Symlinks? Any help would be very much appreciated.

Has anyone else had this problem, and successfully solved it?

I am running Mac OS X 10.5.7, with XAMPP for Mac OS X (Apache 2.0, Perl5, mod_perl 2.0.4)

Thank you!

[Daz]

Hi,

From the information you've provided - this looks like it should work...

Can you post your entire httpd.conf and an 'ln -s' of your cgi directory please and hopefully we can figure something out from there.

Cheers,

Daz

[Shuraski]

(02-17-2010 09:17 AM)Daz Wrote:  Hi,

From the information you've provided - this looks like it should work...

Can you post your entire httpd.conf and an 'ln -s' of your cgi directory please and hopefully we can figure something out from there.

Cheers,

Daz

Daz,
The solution was simple - if you install XAMPP on a Mac you will then have 2 versions of Apache, and therefore 2 httpd.conf files. You have to edit the correct file. When I realized this I made the changes to the XAMPP version of httpd.conf, CGI executes correctly. Sorry to bother the forum with this issue -- but hopefully it will save time for someone.

Thanks again,
Shuraski