Hi,

Google and probably most other search engines don't index website that have URL's in the following format:

http://localhost/mycgi?action=myaction

Basically parametrized URL's containing ? or = characters.

What do I need to do in my CGI program to create Search Engine friendly URL's? Note that I'm not using some fancy framework like fpWeb, just plain old CGI (console type) app.

For example, changing the above URL to something like:

http://localhost/mycgi/myaction

'mycgi' being the CGI application
'myaction' being the parameter passed to the CGI app.

My got a custom written (very basic) wiki, which uses the format of the first URL show, and would like to change my CGI wiki app to use Search Engine friendly URL's so my wiki pages can be indexed by Google.

PS:
Please note, I'm not really into web development, so sorry if this is a dumb sounding question. :)

Regards,
- Graeme -

When using cgi or FastCGI, the PATHINFO environment variable contains the /myaction part - in fact, it contains whatever the server finds after the path to the CGI app.

If you'd do http://localhost/mycgi/myaction/myvariable/myvalue, then PATHINFO would contain myaction/myvariable/myvalue, and you can then parse and use that.

fpweb does the same.

Michael.

Op 2010-07-13 15:21, Michael Van Canneyt het geskryf:

When using cgi or FastCGI, the PATHINFO environment variable contains the /myaction part - in fact, it contains whatever the server finds after the path to the CGI app.

Thanks Michael.

I tried what you suggested but ran into a problem - that environment variable doesn't exist here. I Googled it and I found a website that mentions PATH_INFO environment variable instead. That worked. Thanks for the info.

BTW:
Just so others know, if you call the CGI app directly without any parameters, PATH_INFO is not set as an environment variable. Just another little web gotcha! :)

Regards,
- Graeme -

It was a typo, my mistake. The fp-web property is PathInfo :/

Well, to make things more complicated, newer apache servers allow to disable PATH_INFO passing to CGI scripts alltogether. I guess it is to protect against search engines flooding the CGI scripts. Exactly the opposite of what you want to achieve :-)

Michael.

Michael Van Canneyt wrote

Well, to make things more complicated, newer apache servers allow to disable PATH_INFO passing to CGI scripts alltogether. I guess it is to protect against search engines flooding the CGI scripts. Exactly the opposite of what you want to achieve :-)

I always seem to follow the path with most resistance. :-) Luckily I control the web server setup here.

While we are on the topic of CGI and Apache. Any idea how to tell Apache that a specific file is a CGI program, even though that file has no file extension like the obvious .cgi suffix? This is not to serious - I think Google accepts URLs with a '.' (dot) in the path. eg: http://www.mydoman.com/mmaths/project1.cgi/myparam

More searching on Google revealed one forum post mentioning this...but the author wasn't sure if it works. I couldn't get it to work. :-(

'project1' is my CGI application.

------------ .htaccess ------------------
<Files project1>
AddHandler cgi-script
</Files>
---------------------------------------

In the standard Apache setup it will thread anything you put in the cgi-bin directory regardless of the extension as a cgi program. The path to this is set in httpd.conf here:

#
# ScriptAlias: This controls which directories contain server scripts. # ScriptAliases are essentially the same as Aliases, except that # documents in the target directory are treated as applications and # run by the server when requested rather than as documents sent to the # client. The same rules about trailing "/" apply to ScriptAlias # directives as to Alias.
#
ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ "C:/Program Files/Apache Software Foundation/Apache2.2/cgi-bin/"

in .htacces with rewrite mode is enabled, it easy to convert new style to old one

RewriteEngine on

RewriteRule ^$ project1.cgi [L] RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule (.*) project1.cgi?action=$1 [QSA,L] RewriteRule ^project1.cgi$ project1.cgi

And you have many examples on internet to understand RewriteEngine

Thanks

Op 2010-07-13 17:04, Felipe Monteiro de Carvalho het geskryf:

In the standard Apache setup it will thread anything you put in the cgi-bin directory regardless of the extension as a cgi program. The path to this is set in httpd.conf here:

Thanks for the tip. Unfortunately I can't use the usual cgi-bin for my CGI apps, due to loading of external files as a requirement. Some of our served content is flash which also loads external shared resources - the later is the major obstacle with the usual cgi-bin directory.

Either way, I'll take a look in the Apache configs to see if I could reproduce the cgi-bin behaviour in another directory.

Regards,
- Graeme -