FastCGI wrappers

(The original file was taken from the links described in http://nginxlibrary.com/perl-fastcgi/, that is http://nginxlibrary.com/downloads/perl-fcgi/fastcgi-wrapper. It is attributed to Denis S. Filimonov).

These scripts are intended for use with Apache's mod_fcgid. If the daemonizing code is uncommented and the socket changed to a TCP/IP one, they may be used with nginx as well.

Feel free to use these scripts. Please consider giving changes back to the community.

fastcgi-wrapper.pl

This wrapper may execute virtually anything that uses STDIN and STDOUT. Originally written for Perl scripts, it should only be used for anything but Perl scripts, e.g. ELF binaries, Python CGI scripts etc.

This script works a bit like mod_cgid in that it still forks the application process.

perl-cgi-wrapper.pl

This script is based on the same fastcgi-wrapper script as the one above, but it's adapted for best Perl performance. It doesn't use the usual fork-exec-interpret mechanism (like CGI does). It rather works like the PHP binaries compiled for FastCGI use (php-cgi, for example): It accepts FastCGI requests, reads the file described in the $ENV{SCRIPT_FILENAME} variable and eval()uates it. This mechanism does not involve any forking (as already mentioned), making it quite cheap.

systemd configuration

For perl-cgi-wrapper:

# fcgi-pl.service

[Unit]
Description=Perl CGI scripts for <user>

[Service]
Type=exec
User=<user>
StandardInput=socket
ExecStart=/usr/bin/perl /path/to/fastcgi-wrappers/perl-cgi-wrapper.pl
ExecStop=/bin/kill -TERM $MAINPID

[Install]
WantedBy=network.target

and a socket unit,

Description = "FCGI socket for fcgi-pl (%i)"

[Socket]
ListenStream = 127.0.0.1:8999
Accept = false

[Install]
WantedBy = sockets.target fcgi-pl.service

Note that for this to work, use the standard way of STDIN in the main() function. Start the script using:

sudo systemctl start fcgi-pl.service

nginx configuration

If you use IP sockets with the above configuration:

location /util/ {
        fastcgi_pass   127.0.0.1:8999;
        fastcgi_index  index.pl;
        fastcgi_param  SCRIPT_FILENAME  $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
        include        fastcgi_params;
}

You can alternatively use UNIX domain sockets.

mod_fcgid configuration

A working configuration could look like the following example:

<IfModule mod_fcgid.c>
    FcgidConnectTimeout 20
    FcgidMaxProcesses 30
    FcgidMaxRequestsPerProcess 10000
    FcgidMaxProcessesPerClass 3
    FcgidMaxRequestLen 20000000

    <FilesMatch "\.fcgi">
    AddHandler fcgid-script .fcgi
    Options +ExecCGI
    </FilesMatch>

    <FilesMatch "\.pl">
    AddHandler fcgid-script .pl
    Options +ExecCGI
    FcgidWrapper /usr/local/bin/perl-cgi-wrapper.pl .pl
    </FilesMatch>

    # C/C++/Haskell binaries
    <FilesMatch "\.elf">
    AddHandler fcgid-script .elf
    Options +ExecCGI
    FcgidWrapper /usr/local/bin/fastcgi-wrapper.pl .elf
    </FilesMatch>

</IfModule>

If you don't use suexec or any other modules interfering with mod_fcgid, this is all the configuration you need.