Installing Perl II

Look for the following line on your Apache Web Server's httpd.conf file -

# To use CGI scripts:
#
AddHandler cgi-script .cgi
AddHandler cgi-script .pl

and add that last line if your scripts are also in .pl extensions.

Next, look for this next line in the same file:

ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ "C:/Program Files/Apache Group/Apache/cgi-bin/"

plus the next 11 lines... until and including,

</Directory>

and change that to something like:

ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ "/home/jdesilva/public_html/cgi-bin/"
<Directory "/home/jdesilva/public_html/cgi-bin">
  AllowOverride None
  Options None
  Order allow,deny
  Allow from all
</Directory>

Finally, if you want to be able to (and your live webserver allows you to) run cgi scripts from anywhere and NOT only in your cgi-bin, then you have to add this also to your httpd.conf file:

Look for the following lines -

# This should be changed to whatever you set DocumentRoot to.

then in the next few lines where it says,

Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews

add ExecCGI to it like this:

Options Indexes FollowSymLinks ExecCGI MultiViews

Now any perl script (not only the ones in cgi-bin directory) will run from anywhere on your website.

I hope this covers everything for you to set up your web server on your home or office PC. I know it helped me solve a lot of problems by allowing me to test my web pages and scripts BEFORE uploading them to my webserver.

Besides it's EASY... and before I forget, make sure that the following line is the first line of any perl script you plan to run, otherwise you may get couldn't spawn child process; errors in your Apache error log file.

#!/usr/bin/perl