Making a CGI request to a program (fossil-scm) from Rack (Sinatra)

[Guillermo Estrada]

Hi, I just hope this is the place where I'll find the answer.

Fossil-Scm is a Source Code Management System that has a built in web
server for tracking issues and a wiki and such. It supports CGI also
to avoid running long term processes while hosting multiple repos. The
documentation suggests creating a simple CGI script like this one for
each repo you would like to host:

#!/usr/bin/fossil
repository: /route/to/repo/name.fossil

And this is all fine and works wonders in my web hosting.

What I want to do is to create a Sinatra (Rack) app to manage those
repositories, user authentication, common operations, create, delete,
etc... But in order to do that, I want to be able to manipulate the
route and the output of those webpages called via CGI.

Is there a way to take a request from my Rack application, take some
parameters, send them to the program (fossil) as a CGI request (This I
don't know how) and then get the output html to analyze/modify/etc...
and then sending the response from my Rack app?

Any help would be GREATLY appreciated.

[Joshua Ballanco]

You might start by reading the wiki page for CGI: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Gateway_Interface (and, if you're up to it, read RFC3875 after that). The moral of the story is that a CGI script is just a script that expects a variety of environment variables describing the request made, and the POST/PUT body on stdin. With a little bit of experimentation, I expect you should be able to simply shell-out to Fossil to do what you want.

[Eric Wong]

Guillermo Estrada <phro...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Is there a way to take a request from my Rack application, take some
> parameters, send them to the program (fossil) as a CGI request (This I
> don't know how) and then get the output html to analyze/modify/etc...
> and then sending the response from my Rack app?

There's rack-legacy: git://github.com/eric1234/rack-legacy

unicorn still has a Unicorn::App::ExecCGI module I wrote
before rack-legacy existed:
http://bogomips.org/unicorn.git/tree/lib/unicorn/app/exec_cgi.rb
(The cgit instance on bogomips.org still runs off ExecCGI).

[James Tucker]

rackup(1) that ships with rack can support cgi.

#!/usr/bin/env rackup
run Rack::Lobster

[Guillermo Estrada]

Rack-Legacy might be just EXACTLY what I was looking for :D Thanks for
the link. I just need to learn it and check if it's usable.

On Feb 20, 1:29 pm, Eric Wong <normalper...@yhbt.net> wrote:

[Steve Klabnik]

Is Faraday what you want?