cgi

Common Gateway Interface (CGI) in Gleam.

CGI is not commonly used these days, but there scenarios where it is still a good choice. As CGI programs only run when there is a request to handle they do not use any system resources when there is no traffic. This makes them very efficient for low traffic websites.

It also make deployment really simple! Just copy the new version of the compiled CGI program onto the server and it’ll be used for future requests.

gleam add cgi

import cgi
import gleam/string
import gleam/http/response.{Response}

pub fn main() {
 use request <- cgi.handle_request
 let headers = [#("content-type", "text/plain")]
 let body = "Hello! You send me this request:\n\n" <> string.inspect(request)
 Response(201, headers, body)
}

For your CGI server to run your program you may wish to compile your Gleam program to an escript if using the Erlang target, or bundling it into a single JavaScript file if using the JavaScript target.

Further documentation can be found at https://hexdocs.pm/cgi.

Thank you to Steven vanZyl for plug_cgi, which was used as a reference. Why is there so little information on the CGI protcol online these days?