Hi. I recently thought about trying out some CGI on gmid from omar polo.
Do you have some pointers for some very basic examples for me to
understand, how it works? Are there variables specific to Gemini? Is
there a preferred subset that is know to work on must supporting servers?

Ciao
Martin

On 2022-02-02, Martin <martin@datapulp.de> wrote:
>
> Hi. I recently thought about trying out some CGI on gmid from omar polo.
> Do you have some pointers for some very basic examples for me to
> understand, how it works? Are there variables specific to Gemini? Is
> there a preferred subset that is know to work on must supporting servers?
>
> Ciao
> Martin

I use gemserv as my gemini server. The documentation was in the "README" file
that came with it.

### CGI Environments

These variables are preset for you. If you need more you can define them in the
config file under "cgienv"

- GEMINI_URL
- SERVER_NAME
- SERVER_PROTOCOL
- SERVER_SOFTWARE
- SCRIPT_NAME
- REMOTE_ADDR
- REMOTE_HOST
- REMOTE_PORT
- QUERY_STRING
- PATH_INFO

TLS variables
- AUTH_TYPE
- TLS_CLIENT_HASH
- REMOTE_USER

A simple script. The user types in something and it is echoes back:

#!/usr/bin/perl

$buffer = $ENV{'QUERY_STRING'};
if (defined $buffer ){
print "20 text/gemini; charset=utf-8 \r\n";
print "#CGI page \r\n";
print "Your name is $buffer \r\n";
} else {
print "10 What is your name \r\n";
}

enjoy

Vlad Markov <vlad@happy.dwarf7.net> writes:

> On 2022-02-02, Martin <martin@datapulp.de> wrote:
>>
> I use gemserv as my gemini server. The documentation was in the "README" file
> that came with it.
>
> ### CGI Environments
>
[snip]

I used gemserv too and played around a bit with cgi-bin. Here are some
examples using Perl's Template Toolkit:

https://github.com/gustafe/gemsite/blob/main/cgi-bin/fr.cgi

I've disabled CGI for the time being because I got spooked by security
concerns.

/g.

Tomasino made a video a while back discussing common paradigms when
dealing with CGI and input too, which is helpful:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Anh0sNUCY4

~nytpu

Am 05.02.22 um 01:16 schrieb nytpu:
> Tomasino made a video a while back discussing common paradigms when
> dealing with CGI and input too, which is helpful:
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Anh0sNUCY4
>
> ~nytpu

Many thanks, this is exactly the information I needed. Currently I had
success to some degree with a self made python program. But up to now I
never coded in python, I never coded CGI and I never coded a Gemini app :-D

I also added this to the technical documentation sub-page of my German
language capsule/website:

https://was-ist-gemini.de/technische-gemini-dokumentation.html

gemini://was-ist-gemini.de/technische-gemini-dokumentation.gmi

Great video! I never thought that handling client certificates on the
CGI side would be so easy.

Martin

Am 05.02.22 um 01:16 schrieb nytpu:
> Tomasino made a video a while back discussing common paradigms when
> dealing with CGI and input too, which is helpful:
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Anh0sNUCY4
>
> ~nytpu

I extended the two shell CGI examples provided in the video of Tomasino
a bit and made them self-documented:

gemini://hubbz.de/apps/tls-test
gemini://hubbz.de/apps/input-test

Just in case that somebody other wants to learn about CGI programming too...

Next step for me would be to try out TLS authentication together with
storing some data in a database, sqlite at first. Seems to be easy on
the first view...

Martin

In case people are also interested in exploring SCGI (apparently not
supported by gmid, but supported by other popular servers like gemserv
and Molly Brown), I wrote a gemlog post a while ago on how to write and
deploy an SCGI script using Python:

gemini://gemini.bunburya.eu/gemlog/posts/2021-04-07-dynamic-content-scgi-gemini.gmi