just some stuff

using lua wsapi with mini-httpd

01 Sep 2011

It took me a while to find out how to use lua wsapi.cgi with mini-httpd. however, getting this to work is quite helpful if you dont need something as huge as apache, e.g. to run some small service.

1. configuring mini-httpd

this is quite straight foward, the only important thing is to set your cgi directory. in my example we want no seperate cgi-bin or something, so we simply configure mini-http to execute cgi scripts in "/". ( see cgipat in the example config )

# Example config for mini_httpd.
# Author: Marvin Stark <marv@der-marv.de>

# Uncomment this line for turning on ssl support.
#ssl

# On which host mini_httpd should bind?
host=localhost

# On which port mini_httpd should listen?
port=9999

# Which user mini_httpd should use?
user=nobody

# Run in chroot mode?
#chroot # yes
nochroot # no

# Working directory of mini_httpd.
#dir=<work_dir>

# We are the web files stored?
# Please change this to your needs.
data_dir=/home/username/htdocs/public

# CGI path
cgipat=**.cgi

# Which certificate to use?
#certfile=<certfile>

# Which logfile to use?
logfile=/home/username/logs/mini-httpd.log

# Which pidfile to use?
pidfile=/var/run/mini-httpd.pid

# Which charset to use?
charset=iso-8859-1

save this as myconfig.conf or whatever name you want to give the file, and adjust the settings ( data_dir, port etc )

2. installing lua wsapi

lua wsapi comes with debian squeeze, so all you need to do is installing the package:

# apt-get install liblua5.1-wsapi1

3. wrapping your lua scripts in wsapi

next thing you will need is your index.cgi :

#!/usr/bin/env lua

require "wsapi.cgi"
require "wsapi.request"

function run(wsapi_env)

   local function out()
       local html = [[ hello world ]]
       coroutine.yield(html)
    end

  local headers = { ["Content-type"] = "text/html" }

  return 200, headers, coroutine.wrap(out)

end


wsapi.cgi.run(run)

4. starting mini-httpd

now you can start mini-httpd

#mini-httpd -C myconfig.conf &