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Python CGI

This document provides an overview of CGI scripting using Python, detailing how to handle GET and POST requests, check user input, and debug scripts. It includes walkthroughs for creating simple CGI scripts that interact with users and emphasizes the importance of proper header formatting. Additionally, it outlines exercises to reinforce understanding of CGI concepts and capabilities.

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2 views6 pages

Python CGI

This document provides an overview of CGI scripting using Python, detailing how to handle GET and POST requests, check user input, and debug scripts. It includes walkthroughs for creating simple CGI scripts that interact with users and emphasizes the importance of proper header formatting. Additionally, it outlines exercises to reinforce understanding of CGI concepts and capabilities.

Uploaded by

srivijay689
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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SESSION

TEN

CGI Scripting
10.1 The Python cgi Module
This section is a summary of the CGI material from lectures:

CGI scripts

• Apache passes information via environment variables/stdin


• GET data is passed in environment variables and POST data is passed on standard input. The main reason is
that standard output is more efficient for large quantities of data.
• It expects the returned web content on stdout
• “Hello World” as a CGI script is thus pretty simple:
1 #!/usr/bin/python
2

3 print 'Content-Type: text/plain\r\n\r'


4 print 'Hello World'

• the #!/usr/bin/python or #!/usr/bin/env python invokes Python


• The output must always start with the Content-Type line followed by a blank line
• This tells the server and browser what type of file to expect
• Note the \r\n\r\n – that’s because technically these fields should use Windows CRLF pairs

Python CGI

• The Python cgi module handles both GET and POST requests
• The programmer doesn’t need to know if it is GET or POST
• It gives simple dictionary-like access to the fields:
• The key difference to using a regular dictionary is that you need to add .value to get the value attribute out
of the object returned by the dictionary lookup. The object is called a MiniFieldStorage, and it has attributes
to help if the field is a file or some other type of form field.
1 import cgi
2

3 fields = cgi.FieldStorage()
4

5 first = fields['first'].value
6 last = fields['last'].value
7

8 print """<html>
9 <body>
10 <h1>Hello %s %s</h1>
11 </body>
12 </html>""" % (first, last)

Astroinformatics School 2011 1


SESSION TEN Astroinformatics School 2011

• Since POST requests use standard input, it means that you can only call FieldStorage once, otherwise all
of the POST data will have already been read.

Checking input

• The user can enter arbitrary URLs into the browser

• Typically, if the fields are not specified you want to send back an error page which asks them to fill out the
necessary missing fields.

• So we must check that every field exists that we expect:


1 import cgi
2

3 FIRST = 'first'
4

5 fields = cgi.FieldStorage()
6

7 first = 'NONE'
8 if FIRST in fields:
9 first = fields[FIRST].value

Debugging CGI scripts

• Debugging CGI scripts can be a bit painful

• Error messages (on standard error) are recorded in the web server log not sent to the browser

• We need to redirect standard error so we can see them:


1 import sys
2

3 sys.stderr = sys.stdout

• This makes anything written to stderr go to stdout

• This does not help if there are syntax errors

• The sys.stderr trick only redirects the errors


• They can still be hard to read intermingled with HTML

• The cgitb module by Ka-Ping Yee pretty prints error messages


1 import sys
2 sys.stderr = sys.stdout
3

4 import cgitb
5 cgitb.enable()

• You should use this in any CGI script you are developing

• This and the previous technique should only be done for development systems – showing the error message
to the user is a bit of a security risk since it gives hackers more information about the program internals. It
is much better to have the errors go to a log file in a real system.

James Curran and Tara Murphy 2


SESSION TEN Astroinformatics School 2011

10.2 Walkthroughs
Note: Walkthrough 1 is critical for Stage 3 of the major project as it explains how to set up a CGI script on our
system. Please ask us if you have any problems getting it to work.

10.2.1 Walkthrough 1: Hello Web


In this Walkthrough we create a simple CGI script and get it running on the ICRAR gpu02.icrar.org web
server. You can copy the files from ˜james on gpu02.
Remember that the basic idea of CGI is that rather than retrieving a static (unchanging) HTML file, the web server
can run a program which creates the web page on the fly. This allows for customization and dynamic updating of
the content of the page.

1. Firstly write the following program into a file hello.cgi in your public_html/cgi-bin directory:
1 #!/usr/bin/python
2 print 'Content-Type: text/html\r\n\r'
3

4 print """<html>
5 <head>
6 <title>Hello Web</title>
7 </head>
8 <body>
9 <h1>Hello Web!!</h1>
10 </body>
11 </html>"""

2. Make the file executable


1 % chmod a+x hello.cgi

3. To see what is happening, you can run this program directly from the shell prompt which produces the
following HTML output
1 % ./hello.cgi
2 Content-Type: text/html
3

4 <html>
5 <head>
6 <title>Hello Web</title>
7 </head>
8 <body>
9 <h1>Hello Web!!</h1>
10 </body>
11 </html>

4. Now run your script through a web browser by going to the URL
http://gpu02.icrar.org/∼username/cgi-bin/hello.cgi
you should see a web page with the text Hello Web!!.

5. Note that the file suffix must be .cgi otherwise the web server may not run the script (depending on the
Apache configuration).

All CGI scripts must first print a header Content-Type: text/html informing the web browser what
type of content is being sent. text/html tells the browser that the data is a plain text file containing HTML.
Following the Content-Type header, there must be a blank line. In the example above, this is handled by an
empty print statement on line 3. Leaving this out is a common mistake.

James Curran and Tara Murphy 3


SESSION TEN Astroinformatics School 2011

10.2.2 Walkthrough 2: Hello Web, who are you?


In this walkthrough we build on the previous example to allow the user to enter information and have the CGI
script process it and return a result. This is the basis from which more complex CGI scripts can be created.

1. Firstly we need to create a HTML page hello2.html including a form which will ask for the user’s name.
This needs to go into the public_html directory (not the cgi-bin directory). The HTML should look
something like this:

<html>
<head>
<title>Hello, who are you?</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Hello, who are you?</h1>
<p>
<form action="cgi-bin/hello2.cgi" method="GET">
Please enter your name:
<input type="text" name="name" width="20"><br/>
<input type="submit">
</form>
</p>
</body>
</html>

2. Put this page in your public_html directory and make it world readable chmod a+r hello.html.

3. Now we need to write the CGI script that is declared as the action property of the form element, in this
case hello2.cgi. This script retrieves the name from the CGI request and pastes it into the HTML output.

4. The code should look something like this, which you can download from the course website
1 #!/usr/bin/python
2 import cgi
3 NAMEFIELD = 'name'
4

5 fields = cgi.FieldStorage()
6

7 name = 'Anonymous'
8 if NAMEFIELD in fields:
9 name = fields[NAMEFIELD].value
10

11 print 'Content-Type: text/html'


12 print """
13 <html>
14 <head>
15 <title>Hello %s</title>
16 </head>
17 <body>
18 <h1>Hello %s!!</h1>
19 </body>
20 </html>""" % (name, name)

5. Make sure this file is executable chmod a+rx hello2.cgi and copy it into your public_html/cgi-bin
directory.

6. Now point your browser at the HTML page and test the form
http://gpu02.icrar.org/∼username/hello2.html

James Curran and Tara Murphy 4


SESSION TEN Astroinformatics School 2011

10.2.3 Walkthrough 3: HTML Forms


Make sure you are familiar with creating forms in HTML. This was covered in the basic HTML tutorial you did
in the last lab but if you didn’t get to that bit, you should read through the forms section at
http://www.w3schools.com/html/html forms.asp
By the time you finish this section you should be able to create your own basic form and know how to point it to
a CGI script (you don’t have to write the CGI script yet).

10.2.4 Walkthrough 4: The access and error logs


If your system administrator has made the files accessible, it is often helpful to inspect the access and error log
files. These typically live in the /var/log/apache2 directory and are called access.log and error.log. The
error log is especially useful for debugging CGI script errors.
1 % tail -f /var/log/apache2/error.log
2 ...
3 [Wed Feb 16 20:44:20 2011] [error] (13)Permission denied: exec of '/home/james/public_html/cgi-bin/test.cgi' failed
4 [Wed Feb 16 20:44:20 2011] [error] [client 202.8.37.138] Premature end of script headers: test.cgi

The tail command with the -f is very useful because it sits there checking to see if anything has been added to
the end of the error.log file, and if so it prints it to the screen.

James Curran and Tara Murphy 5


SESSION TEN Astroinformatics School 2011

10.3 Exercises
These exercises combine what we have done previously in Python with the CGI module.

10.3.1 Exercise 1: Words to digits


Write a CGI script and webpage that takes a number as a series of words (e.g. one two three five seven) and
converts it a numerical expression (e.g. 12357) which is displayed in a webpage.

10.3.2 Exercise 2: Crossword solver


Write a CGI script and webpage which returns a list of words matching a given pattern for crossword solvers,
where ? is used to indicate unknown letters. In other words, the user should be able to enter h??se and get back
a list of words matching this pattern.

10.4 Capability checklist


When you’ve finished this lab, check that you know how to. . .

1. Write a website that includes a form for user input

2. Write a basic CGI script in Python

3. Get a website and CGI script working on the IT machines


4. Debug CGI scripts

5. Check the web server error log to find problems

If you don’t know how to do any of these things once you have completed the lab, please come and ask us.

James Curran and Tara Murphy 6

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