SetUp CGI perl on CentOS apache

Setup apache webserver on CentOS

sudo yum install httpd

To make this web server available from lan or we need to whitelist our interfaces as Listen *:80

in /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf 

Now, we setup CGI execution, change the directory settings in httpd.conf

Before restarting httpd we have to change one more thing inside /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf:

<Directory "var/www/html">
    Options +ExecCGI
    AddHandler cgi-script .cgi .pl
</Directory>

Change permissions to allow for CGI to execute

And this one got me stuck a lot! Don't overlook this!

You need to tell your server that these CGI scripts are allowed to be executed as programs.

chmod 705 *.cgi

Or you can target individual CGI scripts.

chmod 705 hello.cgi

Put cgi files in /var/www/cgi-bin/ and run as  http://serverip/cgi-bin/script.cgi

cat /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf | grep ScriptAlias should have something like this in the output

ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ "/var/www/cgi-bin/"

This is enough to run a test cgi script.

In case aces you might need to install more packages for a particular script such as MD5 digest.

# sudo yum install perl-Digest-MD5 -y

Now Reboot Apache : sudo apachectl stop, sudo apachectl start