2
5 Comments

cgi-bin PaaS

I am so tempted to build this. Can't stop thinking about it. It's a platform-as-a-service like Heroku or Zeit but for cgi-bin scripts.

You push your code and it serves static HTML and any scripts in the cgi-bin script folder get mounted as routes like it's 1999. Aw yeah, warehouse jungle raves and editing xserver configs. Back when no-SQL meant you literally had no database and stored everything in text files. Those were the good old days. Take me back!

Please talk me down from this absurd idea.

posted to Icon for group Ideas and Validation
Ideas and Validation
on January 30, 2020
  1. 2

    CHI is a very old protocol. It is considered slow (because it boots a process for every request), insecure, and unreliable. Python is now (has?) removing support for it: https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0594/#cgi so, well, I'm not sure
    On the other hand, the protocol is wonderfully simple and is easy to deploy, even on shared hosting. There are workarounds for the security and reliability now. Perhaps it can make a comeback?

  2. 2

    I like the sentiment and I remember the time when I wrote a lot of cgi scripts in perl and bash. So I also remember the security problems we faced all the time to hosting arbitrary CGI scripts.

    1. 1

      Thanks for the reality check. :)

  3. 2

    You should build a time machine first!

    1. 1

      good idea I'll get started on that a week ago.

  4. 2

    This comment was deleted 6 years ago.

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