NAME

slowcgi —

a FastCGI to CGI wrapper server

SYNOPSIS

slowcgi [-dv] [-p path] [-s socket] [-t timeout] [-U user] [-u user]

DESCRIPTION

slowcgi is a server which implements the FastCGI Protocol to execute CGI scripts. FastCGI was designed to overcome the CGI protocol's scalability and resource sharing limitations. While CGI scripts need to be forked for every request, FastCGI scripts can be kept running and handle many HTTP requests.

slowcgi is a simple server that translates FastCGI requests to the CGI protocol. It executes the requested CGI script and translates its output back to the FastCGI protocol.

Modern web frameworks and web applications usually come with the capability to run as FastCGI servers. slowcgi is not intended for these applications.

slowcgi opens a socket at /var/www/run/slowcgi.sock, owned by www:www, with permissions 0660. It will then chroot(8) to /var/www and drop privileges to user “www”.

The options are as follows:

-d: Do not daemonize. If this option is specified, slowcgi will run in the foreground and log to stderr.
-p path: chroot(2) to path. A path of / effectively disables the chroot.
-s socket: Create and bind to alternative local socket at socket.
-t timeout: Terminate the request after timeout seconds instead of the default 120 seconds. The CGI script is left to run but its standard input, output and error will be closed.
-U user: Change the owner of /var/www/run/slowcgi.sock to user and its primary group instead of the default www:www.
-u user: Drop privileges to user instead of default user www and chroot(8) to the home directory of user.
-v: Enable more verbose (debug) logging.

STANDARDS

Mark R. Brown, FastCGI Specification, April 1996.

D. Robinson, K. Coar, The Common Gateway Interface (CGI) Version 1.1, RFC 3875, October 2004.

HISTORY

The slowcgi server first appeared in OpenBSD 5.4.

AUTHORS

Florian Obser

BUGS

slowcgi only implements the parts of the FastCGI standard needed to execute CGI scripts. This is intentional.

August 6, 2022