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Ask HN: Does anyone use CGI scripts anymore?
Just curious - doing a quick landing page for a client on shared hosting and another dev and I were just remarking on the reliable old /cgi-bin dir laying about the docroot.
In my entire career I've never used it - does anyone still use CGI scripts on a day to day basis? If so, what for?
- LinuxBender 9y agoI use it for my own sites, mostly for file uploading, forums, etc... We use them at work in simple cases where writing something in java or C would have been overkill. CGI will be around for a very long time.
- technion 9y agocPanel still puts this there by default - your hosting provider may not even be aware of it in a modern environment.
- stevekemp 9y agoYes. I write a lot of scripts using the Perl CGI::Application framework, and that uses FastCGI to boot up. It might not be sexy, but it is easy to test, and allows me to use a wide array of Perl modules in my codebase.
- twobyfour 9y agoOh, wow, there's a flashback. Nope, haven't used CGI in almost exactly a decade. We used to use them for formmail scripts and collecting email addresses for mailing lists on otherwise static websites. Once I convinced that employer to move our clients to hosting that supported PHP (yes, PHP - this was 2006-2007 after all), and to gradually migrate them onto content management systems, CGI became unnecessary.