Setting up python scripts for use in support of web pages can be tricky in view of security concerns. Normally, a common gateway interface (CGI) script would simply be a program in a cgi-bin directory, executed directly, as in
http://arcib.dowling.edu/~bernsteh/cgi-bin/pystat.py
However, for security reasons, the direct execution path via the web server is normally disabled. Instead, the python script has to be executed running as an ordinary user, rather than from a system account as
http://arcib.dowling.edu/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/bernsteh/pystat.py
The code in pystat.py, could, for example, be a variant of the code at
http://code.activestate.com/recipes/52220-the-simplest-cgi-program/:
#!/usr/bin/python2.5
print "Content-type: text/html"
print
print "<html>"
print "<head>"
print "<title>pystat.py</title>"
print "</head>"
print "<body>"
print "<pre>"
import os, sys
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>"
print "</body>"
print "</html>"
If this is stored as pystat.py in the public_html/cgi-bin/ directory of the user bernsteh on arcib.dowling.edu and made executable by
chmod 755 pystat.py
then going to the url
http://arcib.dowling.edu/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/bernsteh/pystat.py?arg1=1&arg2=2
should produce the output
Python 2.5.1 (r251:54863, May 4 2007, 16:52:23) [GCC 4.1.2] DOCUMENT_ROOT /var/www/html/arcib GATEWAY_INTERFACE CGI/1.1 HTTP_ACCEPT text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8 HTTP_ACCEPT_CHARSET ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7 HTTP_ACCEPT_ENCODING gzip,deflate HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE en-us,en;q=0.5 HTTP_CACHE_CONTROL max-age=0 HTTP_CONNECTION keep-alive HTTP_COOKIE __utma=257279262.3665434704854877700.1236790017.1287598061.1287602078.155; __utmz=257279262.1282495313.110.10.utmcsr=google|utmccn=(organic)|utmcmd=organic|utmctr=dowling%20college HTTP_HOST arcib.dowling.edu HTTP_KEEP_ALIVE 115 HTTP_USER_AGENT Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.2.11) Gecko/20101012 Firefox/3.6.11 PATH /bin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/usr/sbin PATH_TRANSLATED /var/www/html/arcib/bernsteh/pystat.py QUERY_STRING arg1=1&arg2=2 REMOTE_ADDR 149.72.1.251 REMOTE_PORT 49605 REQUEST_METHOD GET REQUEST_URI /cgi-bin/cgiwrap/bernsteh/pystat.py?arg1=1&arg2=2 SCRIPT_FILENAME /home/faculty/bernsteh/public_html/cgi-bin/pystat.py SCRIPT_NAME /cgi-bin/cgiwrap/bernsteh/pystat.py SERVER_ADDR 149.72.27.28 SERVER_ADMIN terahz@geodar.com SERVER_NAME arcib.dowling.edu SERVER_PORT 80 SERVER_PROTOCOL HTTP/1.1 SERVER_SIGNATURE Apache/2.2.4 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.4 OpenSSL/0.9.8e DAV/2 PHP/5.2.3 Server at arcib.dowling.edu Port 80 SERVER_SOFTWARE Apache/2.2.4 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.4 OpenSSL/0.9.8e DAV/2 PHP/5.2.3 UNIQUE_ID UQTpQpVIGxwAAEirX7MAAAAJ
Note that the arguments passed as "arg1=1&arg2=2" are now the value for the key "QUERY_STRING" in the dictionary os.environ, i.e. the value of os.environ["QUERY_STRING"]