How to call a shell script from Apache?

Question

I would like to display "Hello from shell" generated by a shell script called by Apache.

To do that I created a script test.sh in the /usr/lib/cgi-bin/ folder. In this file I wrote :

#!/bin/bash
# get today's date
OUTPUT="$(date)"
# You must add following two lines before
# outputting data to the web browser from shell
# script
 echo "Content-type: text/html"
 echo ""
 echo "<html><head><title>Demo</title></head><body>"
 echo "Today is $OUTPUT <br>"
 echo "Current directory is $(pwd) <br>"
 echo "Shell Script name is $0"
 echo "</body></html>"

My configuration of Apache (apache2.conf) is:

# Sets the default security model of the Apache2 HTTPD server. It does
# not allow access to the root filesystem outside of /usr/share and /var/www.
# The former is used by web applications packaged in Debian,
# the latter may be used for local directories served by the web server. If
# your system is serving content from a sub-directory in /srv you must allow
# access here, or in any related virtual host.
<Directory />
    Options FollowSymLinks
    AllowOverride None
    Require all denied
</Directory>

<Directory /usr/share>
    AllowOverride None
    Require all granted
</Directory>

<Directory /var/www/>
    Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
    AllowOverride None
    Require all granted
</Directory>

#<Directory /srv/>
#   Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
#   AllowOverride None
#   Require all granted
#</Directory>

# AccessFileName: The name of the file to look for in each directory
# for additional configuration directives.  See also the AllowOverride
# directive.
#
AccessFileName .htaccess
#
# The following lines prevent .htaccess and .htpasswd files from being
# viewed by Web clients.
#
<FilesMatch "^\.ht">
    Require all denied
</FilesMatch>
#
# The following directives define some format nicknames for use with
# a CustomLog directive.
#
# These deviate from the Common Log Format definitions in that they use %O
# (the actual bytes sent including headers) instead of %b (the size of the
# requested file), because the latter makes it impossible to detect partial
# requests.
#
# Note that the use of %{X-Forwarded-For}i instead of %h is not recommended.
# Use mod_remoteip instead.
#
LogFormat "%v:%p %h %l %u %t \"%r\" %>s %O \"%{Referer}i\" \"%{User-Agent}i\"" vhost_combined
LogFormat "%h %l %u %t \"%r\" %>s %O \"%{Referer}i\" \"%{User-Agent}i\"" combined
LogFormat "%h %l %u %t \"%r\" %>s %O" common
LogFormat "%{Referer}i -> %U" referer
LogFormat "%{User-agent}i" agent

# Include of directories ignores editors' and dpkg's backup files,
# see README.Debian for details.

# Include generic snippets of statements
IncludeOptional conf-enabled/*.conf

# Include the virtual host configurations:
IncludeOptional sites-enabled/*.conf

# vim: syntax=apache ts=4 sw=4 sts=4 sr noet
ServerName 192.168.1.156

And when I run http://localhost/cgi-bin/test.sh, I had this error: Not Found. The requested URL /cgi-bin/test.sh was not found on this server.

So I don't know if the folder /cgi-bin/ have to be in an other directory? How can I change the Apache configuration to redirect to this folder?

Thank you!

Elvis Plesky · Accepted Answer · 2017-08-22 00:42:18Z

6

First make sure that script has executable bit:

chmod +x /usr/lib/cgi-bin/test.sh

Next enable mod_cgi module and restart apache:

a2enmod cgi
service apache2 restart

And finally make sure that you have config like /etc/apache2/conf-available/serve-cgi-bin.conf (this is config for Ubuntu) which contains the following directives:

ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ /usr/lib/cgi-bin/
<Directory "/usr/lib/cgi-bin">
  AllowOverride None
  Options +ExecCGI -MultiViews +SymLinksIfOwnerMatch
  Require all granted
</Directory>

answered Aug 22, 2017 at 0:42

Elvis Plesky

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1 Comment

GregG Over a year ago

this is a concise answer that worked perfectly for my apache2 env

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