Setting up Perl FastCGI with Nginx

This article assumes that you are running on Debian Lenny (or above) and uses aptitude/apt-get for fetching and installing packages.

Install these packages :

apt-get install nginx libfcgi-perl wget

Now we replace Nginx’s package maintainer’s vhosts file with our own.

mv /etc/nginx/sites-available/default /etc/nginx/sites-available/default.old
vi /etc/nginx/sites-available/default

Put these as the file contents :

server {
  listen   80;
  server_name  example.com www.example.com;
  root   /var/www/example.com;
  access_log  /var/www/logs/example.com.access.log;  

  location / {
      index  index.html index.htm index.pl;
  }  

  location ~ \.pl|cgi$ {
      try_files $uri =404;
      gzip off;
      fastcgi_pass  127.0.0.1:8999;
      fastcgi_index index.pl;
      fastcgi_param  SCRIPT_FILENAME  $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
      include fastcgi_params;
      } 
}

Now let us create the directory where the site will reside and assign proper ownership to it.

mkdir /var/www/example.com
chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/example.com

Next, we should download and configure a FastCGI wrapper script (credit: Denis S. Filimonov), a Debian init script to start/stop the FastCGI process, give them the necessary permissions to be executed and set the init script to start up the FastCGI daemon automatically.

wget http://nginxlibrary.com/downloads/perl-fcgi/fastcgi-wrapper -O /usr/bin/fastcgi-wrapper.pl
wget http://nginxlibrary.com/downloads/perl-fcgi/perl-fcgi -O /etc/init.d/perl-fcgi
chmod +x /usr/bin/fastcgi-wrapper.pl
chmod +x /etc/init.d/perl-fcgi
update-rc.d perl-fcgi defaults
insserv perl-fcgi

Now that everything is done, let us start Nginx and test out a sample Perl script.

/etc/init.d/nginx start
/etc/init.d/perl-fcgi start
vi /var/www/example.com/index.pl

Put the following in the file :

#!/usr/bin/perl

print "Content-type:text/html\n\n";
print <<EndOfHTML;
<html><head><title>Perl Environment Variables</title></head>
<body>
<h1>Perl Environment Variables</h1>
EndOfHTML

foreach $key (sort(keys %ENV)) {
  print "$key = $ENV{$key}<br>\n";
}

print "</body></html>";

Let us make the script executable by issuing the following command :

chmod a+x /var/www/example.com/index.pl

Now, go to example.com and you’ll see a list of Perl environment variables if everything was done correctly.

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Setting up Perl FastCGI with Nginx

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