fastcgi without the module

morgon has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hi,

I have a little openwrt-box with lighthttpd that can do fastcgi.

Unfortunately the way perl is packaged on openwrt is a bit strange (eg. when you only install the perl-package you won't get the strict-module) and I would like to confine myself to the perl-modules that are packaged for openwrt if possible and neither FCGI nor CGI::Fast are.

So my question is:

Is it possible to write a fast-cgi application in perl when all you have is the CGI.pm? What would you need to adapt from a pure cgi-script?

Many thanks!

Comment on fastcgi without the module

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Re: fastcgi without the module by Fletch (Bishop) on Dec 01, 2020 at 22:02 UTC
FastCGI is (I believe; slightly rusty but going from memory) a C library implementing its API that lets a web server (e.g. `mod_fcgi` in apache) start up a persistent process which it will send requests to for handling. Theoretically one could write your own implementation of the API in perl (there's Net::FastCGI on CPAN, but I have no experience with it and since it looks that module hasn't been updated in 7 years . . .), but if your perl install is so stripped down (one might even say crippled) that it doesn't have strict you're probably not going to have a good time of it. What I'd try would be seeing if you can instal a more complete perl (a quick googling shows OpenWRT splits perl into an extremely strangely large number of subpackages so keep adding those) and the C FastCGI library and try installing the normal FCGI module from CPAN then. The cake is a lie. The cake is a lie. The cake is a lie.	[reply] [d/l]
Re^2: fastcgi without the module by morgon (Priest) on Dec 01, 2020 at 23:23 UTC
I have strict, what I meant is that you need to install an extra package to get it. Everything is split into tiny packages and often the dependencies are not properly reflected. I may try to get cpan to work but probably I cannot really be bothered too much as for the little think I want to do cgi would be good enough...	[reply]
Re^3: fastcgi without the module by Fletch (Bishop) on Dec 02, 2020 at 04:32 UTC
Aaah; I misunderstood / read that as you were trying to make do without all of the bits. In that case then Mojolicious and I'm sure the other frameworks like Dancer2 usually come with their own http server implementations (Plack mentioned above too) which will run your application (and to some degree also serve flat files) directly which would eliminate the need to run apache (or lighttpd or . . .) with fastcgi. That might be another route to look into. The cake is a lie. The cake is a lie. The cake is a lie.	[reply]
Re: fastcgi without the module by Your Mother (Archbishop) on Dec 02, 2020 at 02:07 UTC
From what I can see, and I’ve never dealt with openwrt, nginx is available as well as fastcgi and uwsgi plugins for it. IF that means you can build uwsgi with psgi, that’s what I would recommend over fastcgi. It will mean using either an app framework or naked psgi code (Plack). Nothing wrong with lighttpd, I just think nginx is better. uwsgi is a superior app engine in general. If you’re stuck with CGI or just want it for simplicity, this nginx version seems to support it, not all do.	[reply]
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