XSSCRIPTS(5) BSD File Formats Manual XSSCRIPTS(5)NAME
.xsscripts — XS-httpd file interpreter settings
DESCRIPTION
Traditionally all files in a user's .html directory contain static data.
Mostly HTML markup data, but also images and archives. However most peo‐
ple desire more than only static HTML.
So webservers offer Server-Side Includes, to allow conditional blocks,
page counters and even output from external programs in HTML text (see
httpd(1) for a full overview). But even SSI's may not offer all the flex‐
ibility that people look for, so it is possible to include your own pro‐
grams (be it shell scripts, compiled C progs, PHP or anything else you
can start from Unix prompt) by placing them in the /cgi-bin subdirectory.
Rather than being confined to a single directory, XS-httpd also offers a
flexible mechanism to let the users specify which files should be exe‐
cuted and which should be offered with full source to the website visi‐
tor. This allows you a per-file configuration so that you can have any
file interpreted as a program, rather than being confined to the /cgi-bin
directory, which is more typing and a also clear indication to any visi‐
tor that it is a program.
Users can include the interpretation settings through a .xsscripts file
which may be placed in any html directory. The settings apply recursively
to all subdirectories. The system administration may also include global
settings through the script.methods file in the main XS-httpd configura‐
tion directory. This may be convenient if you want, for instance, all
*.php files to be parsed by a PHP interpreter.
Additional command line options may not be specified in the configuration
file. In order to supply extra parameters to the interpreter, one must
write a wrapper script that handles these options. The interpreter will
be executed from the directory containing the requested file; with the
appropriate filename as the single argument.
File Layout
Every line contains the name of the interpreter that should be run, and a
suffix of the filenames from the html directory that are to be handled by
this interpreter. To have all files with the extension .pl interpreted by
Perl, add the following line:
/usr/local/bin/perl .pl
Lines starting with ‘#’ will be ignored as comments.
The special extension ‘*’ is supported to indicate a default interpreter
program that should handle all files for which no other interpreters are
specified. Note that the directive
internal:exec *
practically turns a normal directory into a cgi-binary directory.
Built-in Interpreters
Apart from external programs, several built-in directives can be speci‐
fied as well, to handle files with a certain extension in a special way.
The directives that can be used are:
internal:404
To generate a ‘404 Not Found’ error whenever a matching file is
requested. This can for instance be used for files that are only
included in other HTML files (standard header or footer) and
never requested directly. Give these a special extension like
.htmli
internal:text
Treat as a normal document rather than an executable CGI. This
allows you to present HTML documents in a cgi-bin directory. The
directive can also be used to overridden global settings or more
general matching rules.
internal:exec
Directly execute the program, without an interpreter. The files
with a matching extension should have the execute bit set with
chmod(1).
FILES
script.methods
Global configuration file with interpreter directives, located in
SystemRoot/conf/.
.xsscripts
Local configuration file with interpreter directives, located in
any html data directory.
SEE ALSOhttpd(1), xsconf(5), mime.types(5), httpd_cgi(7)
The project homepage: http://www.xs-httpd.org/
xs-httpd/3.5 June 12, 2002 xs-httpd/3.5
