Nginx-CGI brings support for CGI to Nginx and angie

by jesprenj • 11 months ago

49 33 11 months ago

eBay confused the 17 year old me back in 2007 when their listings were powered by a dll file.

    cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll

It wasn't for many years later that I discovered knowledge about CGI.

treyd• 11 months ago

I never did understand why this path/file structure was exposed.

immibis2• 11 months ago

Same reason https://foo.example/bar/baz.html exposes it - it tells the web server which file to access. Cool, customized routing wasn't always a thing.

The eBay example, by the way, is ISAPI, not CGI.

toast02• 11 months ago

In the beginning, eBay used to run the frontends on Windows, with IIS. When they moved to something else, they kept the urls, because cool urls don't change.

finaard• 11 months ago

Unfortunately most of the people out there don't care about that - majority of the links I've set on my site over the decades are dead nowadays. If I ever get bored I'll write a script that'll check if there's an archive copy, and link to that.

I also went through quite a bit of effort to make sure _my_ links don't break. There are a handful of tools (like a dig wrapper for DNS lookups) which still can be reached as /cgi-bin/dig.cgi, even though they haven't been a standalone CGI script for two decades now. It's still technically CGI (just running as fastcgi nowadays), and the code base is just as good as you'd expect from what started as an experiment to see how much of a text markup parser I can write using perl regexp only.

electroglyph• 11 months ago

OpenResty + Lua ftw

lemcoe9• 11 months ago

Absolutely. For me, OpenResty combined with a custom Lua script solved an incredibly complicated business problem that I ran into a couple years ago, and now that arrangement serves thousands of complex requests per day. With Nginx and that custom code combined into a single configuration, not requiring a separate backend service, we turned a complicated problem into a very simple one!

lovehashbrowns• 11 months ago

I used OpenResty + Lua + Redis to implement a quick blacklist for an ad platform like 10 years ago. It really does make everything so simple and it's pretty fun to work with.

klibertp• 11 months ago

Yes, but.

OpenResty is a platform with multiple advantages. It's fast (Nginx), it's async via stackless coroutines (no function coloring), it's again fast (LuaJIT), it's relatively easy to deploy, it's feature-rich (all the Lua packages available), and it integrates well with some other tech like Redis (also Lua-enabled).

On the other hand, Lua is an extension language. It's not designed to support large codebases. You can, of course, with enough discipline, make it work - just as you can, with enough grit, make Perl, JavaScript, Ruby, or older Python work, but you're on your own then. You need to invent your own code organization scheme and adhere to it religiously. You need to reinvent half of the stdlib that Python provides out of the box. The reinventing process extends to the need to create a set of helpers to define classes and inheritance between them, which are only provided as powerful but inconvenient primitives (metatables) in Lua.

It's incredible how much you can do with just 100 sloc in OpenRESTY - it's absolutely amazing as a component of a larger system. However, writing lengthy, uninspiring, yet complicated business logic in Lua under OpenResty is not a good idea.

don-code• 11 months ago

I wrote a web application in an internship, circa 2011. I had no existing platform/framework to work with, no mentorship (the team wasn't really prepared to support an intern), and most importantly, an Apache web server running in Cygwin, with no PHP runtime installed. No one as much as told me what language I'd be writing at this job.

The Web development I'd done up to that point consisted of raw HTML/CSS, with some ASP.NET or PHP running on the backend. I'd never written a line of JavaScript in my life.

It was at this point that I "discovered" a winning combination: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript running in the user's browser. The backend was a set of C# applications which wrote to standard out, which could be invoked directly by Apache's mod_cgi, since C# compiles down to Windows executables. There were countless better other solutions at this point - ASP.NET/PHP (as I'd already used). FastCGI, WSGI, and others were all a thing at this point, but I'd never heard of them.

I outputted a JavaScript object (I had no idea what JSON was at the time, or that I was effectively outputting it) and read it back into the browser using a thin wrapper around XMLHttpRequest. I then iterated over the outputm and transformed the data into tables. JQuery was a thing at that point, but likewise, I'd never heard of it.

Say what you will about the job, the team, the mentorship (or lack theorof) - it took them three months before they realized I'd written C# at a Java shop, and at that point the thing was already being used widely across engineering.

The important takeaway here was, that "winning combination" of some minimal JavaScript and CGI was the perfect ratio of simple, approachable, and powerful, to enable me to finish the task at hand, and in a way that (at least until anybody saw the architecture) everybody was thrilled with. It didn't require a deeper understanding of a framework to bootstrap it from nothing. Write an HTTP response to standard out, formatted as an object, and you were on your way.

lenkite• 11 months ago

This architecture is also wonderful for diagnosis and investigation. You have effectively broken down the problem into CLI tools that can be independently tested and invoked with problematic requests.

dspillett• 11 months ago

It is also the pattern many APIs and function-based architectures are embracing again, partly for that reason (directly, or as a side effect of good decoupling being a core goal).

johnorourke• 11 months ago

Brings back memories! I used it in 1996 to build an e-commerce site in Perl v4.

Bender• 11 months ago

Nice. Might this eventually be incorporated by F5's or Maxim's NGinx? I am also curious if any performance testing has been done on this vs. fcgiwrap both in terms of requests per second and also socket limits and memory usage.

BirAdam• 11 months ago

I’ve just used fastcgiwrap for this purpose with nginx. I hats the advantage of this?

Edit: nvm. It looks like it’s just easier to configure.

gitprolinux• 11 months ago

How is the performance in contrast to the better existing in my opinion of apache2 with its cgi solution?

Nginx-CGI brings support for CGI to Nginx and angie

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