CGI - Common Gateway Interface

The Common Gateway Interface, or CGI

is a standard for external gateway programs to interface with information servers such as HTTP servers. The current version is CGI/1.1. Alien Hosts Provides CGI progams to run on our Windows 2003 servers. Altough CGI is an older technology, CGI hosting scripts are still widley used.

See Our Plans That Include Cgi and Cgi-bin on All Hosting Plans

CGI Documentation

If you have no idea what CGI is, you should read this introduction. Once you have a basic idea of what CGI is and what you can use it for, you should read this primer which will help you get started writing your own gateways.

If you are interested in handling the output of HTML forms with your CGI program, you will want to read this guide to handling forms with CGI programs.

Security is a crucial issue when writing CGI programs. Please read these tips on how to write CGI programs which do not allow malicious users to abuse them.

When you get more advanced, you should read the interface specification which will help you utilize CGI to the fullest extent. If you are a server software author, it will help you add CGI compliance to your information server.

There is now also a tutorial for writing ErrorDocument handling CGI scripts.

Article Is Located at: http://hoohoo.ncsa.uiuc.edu/cgi/

Examples of CGI behavior and programs

You may wish to look at this page of examples which demonstrate how the client URL affects the interface variables. We have created an archive of CGI programs on our FTP server. These programs were written by various people around the world in a variety of programming languages. Some of the entries are libraries which may make writing your CGI program easier.

CGI - Common Gateway Interface