From: ara.t.howard@...
Date: 2006-07-25T23:33:05+09:00
Subject: Re: FCGI:  How do you use it?

On Tue, 25 Jul 2006, Tom Allison wrote:

> I'm kind of perplexed here so I'll ask the stupid questions.
>
> When I use perl and call for a CGI module, I get with it all kinds of really
> cool abilities related to %ENV and STDIN/STDOUT and the ability to even set
> cookies...
>
> I can't find much of anything about what FCGI/FastCGI offers in terms of
> methods or properties that are similar..
>
> Is it correct to assume that FCGI doesn't do any of this and if I'm
> interested in any kind of CGI related functionality (headers, cookies,
> %ENV...) then I should probably just load the CGI modules?

fcgi loads the cgi module for you.  when you write

   FCGI.each_cgi do |cgi|
                     ^^^
                     ^^^
                     ^^^
   end

then cgi is a cgi object with all the methods any cgi object has (mostly).
these are documented in standard ruby docs, which can be found most anywhere,
including http://rubydoc.org.

> Now onto the Ruby specific nature of the question, but if anyone here knows
> the perl-specific question above I would also appreciate it:
>
> Is there some way I can run the ruby fcgi scripts from command line to test?
> Editing and restarting apache all the time is not very fun.

i answered this in your other post, but here it goes again:

here is an example fcgi program:

   fortytwo :/var/www/html > cat env2.fcgi
   #! /usr/local/bin/ruby
   require 'rubygems' rescue nil
   require 'fcgi'
   require 'yaml'

   FCGI.each_cgi{|cgi| cgi.out{ "<pre>#{ cgi.env_table.to_hash.to_yaml }</pre>" }}


and here's running it

   fortytwo :/var/www/html > ./env2.fcgi </dev/null | head
   Content-Type: text/html
   Content-Length: 4037

   <pre>---
   XAUTHORITY: /home/ahoward/.Xauthority
   GS_LIB: /home/ahoward/.fonts
   SSH_ASKPASS: /usr/libexec/openssh/gnome-ssh-askpass
   KONSOLE_DCOP_SESSION: DCOPRef(konsole-4421,session-4)
   MAIL: /var/spool/mail/ahoward
   KDEDIR: /usr


> Under ruby should I load fcgi, cgi, cgi/cookie, cgi/session rather than
> expecting any of this kind of insight into the HTTP process from the FCGI
> working environment?  (please don't take any of these negative questions to
> be a slight on FCGI/FastCGI

you don't need to load cgi.  you must load cgi/cookie and cgi/session if you
intende you use them.  they are also documented in the standard docs.

> It's a stupid question but I would feel stupider if I found I was loading
> multiple modules when only one was required.  I haven't really found
> anything that tells me that fcgi does other than some rudimentary examples.
> (or is it that simple and I'm just trying to make it complicated?)

i think that may be the case ;-)  the source is also quite simple if you take a
look at it.  fcgi ships with a pure ruby version which is light reading.

> Simply put, I can't seem to find any way to discover what fcgi provides
> under ruby (variables, methods).  But I would like to use it and understand
> that many do.
>
> The documentation around the whole FastCGI thing is either very slim or hard
> to find.  I did not find the whitepaper a very encouraging read since I'm
> not designing an HTTP server.  I'm trying to be a user of the product.

the key is that fcgi hands you a cgi-like object and that object __is__ documented.

good luck.

-a
-- 
suffering increases your inner strength.  also, the wishing for suffering
makes the suffering disappear.
- h.h. the 14th dali lama