Custom Action/Handler for Apache

Question

OK, so here's my situation :

• I've written an interpreter (for a language of my own design)
• I need every file with a specific extension (e.g. .xxx) to be first handled by my interpreter

Here's what I've tried so far (other than... messy solutions with exec via PHP... lol) :

.htaccess

Options -ExecCGI -MultiViews -Includes -Indexes FollowSymLinks

Action lgm-cgi /usr/local/bin/lgm -c
AddHandler lgm-cgi .lgml

But guess what : It's not working.

I'm requesting www.mydomain.com/index.lgml and instead of returning the processed file, it returns the very same file (index.lgml) as text.

What am I doing wrong? Any suggestions?

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I don't consider myself anywhere close to an expert regarding server configuration and .htaccess so I suppose this whole thing might be much easier than I expect; so please shed some light! :-)

Answer 1

You have mixed two distinct concepts: handlers and actions. You'd have to write a module to introduce new handler into the httpd server. After that, you'd have to use AddHandler or SetHandler to actually bind it with certain file type and/or URL space.

You would have to double check your error logs, but I suspect that while serving the .lgml file Apache figured out, that lgm-cgi handler doesn't exist and fell back to default-handler, which served your file as flat text.

You are correct however, to use Action here as it is appropriate. You just need to use it a bit differently. First, you should introduce a custom type for your file:

AddType application/lgml .lgml

...then associate that type with your action:

Action application/lgml /usr/local/bin/lgm -c

This should work.

EDIT: As pointed out by kbro, 2nd argument to Action should be a CGI Script. So you'd have to write one (lets say /cgi-bin/lgm-handler.sh) which would call /usr/local/bin/lgm under the hood. Then you would introduce it into the server as such:

Action application/lgml /cgi-bin/lgm-handler.sh