lesson to learn CGIs

[J. Landman Gay]

-= JB =- wrote:
> Does it make a difference if you chmod 755 it before you FTP?
> I know a little about FTP and have Captain FTP.  Is the on-rev
> FTP already turned on?

You can't do that, it has to be done on the server. And yes, FTP is 
ready to use.

You are correct that CGI is a different way to use the engine than the 
new on-rev scripting, and it does allow you to use stacks as libraries, 
which on-rev does not (or at least, not yet) so you're on the right 
track using the old-style CGI method if you want to use stacks. Here's a 
recap of some things that may be causing problems:

1. If you are trying to use CGI on your on-rev web space, it's Linux. 
You need to copy the Linux engine over there. It doesn't matter what 
your home machine is; you need the engine that matches the server OS. 
The engine and all your scripts must go into the cgi-bin folder.

2. Before uploading, use BBEdit or a similar editor to set all your 
script line endings to unix line endings. Again, that's because the 
server is Linux. The machine you use to create the files is immaterial; 
you need to match the server OS.

3. The declaration at the top of each script must match the name of the 
engine in your cgi-bin folder. My tutorial uses "revolution" but 
personally I generally just use "rev" because it's shorter and I'm lazy. 
It doesn't matter what you name the Rev engine on the server -- it could 
be "xlzy" if you want -- as long as every script you upload has the 
exact same engine declaration at the top. Capitalization matters, so 
check that. Also make sure that every script you use has a blank line 
under the engine declaration -- that's required.

4. Upload using an FTP client if possible. I have used the webDAV method 
too, but it copies separate resouce forks to the server which are 
useless on Linux (those are the files that start with "_.". You can 
delete those from the server without any problem.) But using a dedicated 
FTP app, those extra files never get copied to the server in the first 
place. Also, an FTP app allows me to set file permissions easily.

5. Once you have everything on the server, go down the list of each 
newly-uploaded file and set its permissions to 755. In general you can't 
do this with the Mac "get info" box, you need terminal or an FTP client. 
That's another good reason to use a dedicated FTP app.

I did an experiment the other day to see if CGI worked with the on-rev 
servers and it works great. I dumped a copy of the linux engine into the 
cgi-bin folder, copied over the "echo.mt" test script, set permissions 
on both to 755, and bingo, it worked immediately. No missing library 
errors either, which is a big problem on many other hosting services. 
On-rev "just works", to steal a phrase. ;)

-- 
Jacqueline Landman Gay         |     jacque at hyperactivesw.com
HyperActive Software           |     http://www.hyperactivesw.com