I operate a Web site on a shared hosting service that runs CGIs under suexec. The site contains three "segments" (this number will increase in the future), each of which contains one or more git repositories and has a rewrite rule to map the URLs of those repositories to gitweb, a CGI script. I want to keep only one copy of gitweb on the server for ease of maintenance, but it needs to know on which segment it was called so it can select the correct configuration file. Naturally, I tried passing an environment variable named GITWEB_PROJECT_SEG having a different value in each rewrite rule, but suexec dropped the variable when it cleaned the environment. I see that two people complained about this previously on the list and decided to patch their own suexec to pass the variables they wanted: http://httpd.markmail.org/message/ncyrj4zbshauqwjr http://httpd.markmail.org/message/2o3ghiwvhtfnzmw6 I don't think this is a viable long-term solution, particularly for shared hosts. Instead, I propose that a new safe namespace, perhaps CGI_ (I'm open to suggestions for a better name), be allocated for rewrite rules and potentially other Web server directives to pass information to CGI scripts. REDIRECT_CGI_ should also be accepted as safe to accommodate rewrite rules in htaccess files. (My Web host won't let me edit the virtual-host-level configuration but gives me essentially "AllowOverride All" for htaccess files.) My current workaround is to stuff my variable in the HTTP_ namespace and use an additional rewrite rule to copy it back from REDIRECT_HTTP_ after an internal redirect, but this feels very kludgy. Once the safe namespace is documented, it would be great if suexec logged each environment variable removal and provided a pointer to that documentation. I wasted an hour trying to find out how my variable was getting "lost", and I would love to save other novice Web administrators that trouble. Comments? Unless someone suggests a better approach, I will write and post the patch; it should be pretty straightforward. -- Matt --------------------------------------------------------------------- The official User-To-User support forum of the Apache HTTP Server Project. See <URL:http://httpd.apache.org/userslist.html> for more info. To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscribe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx " from the digest: users-digest-unsubscribe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx For additional commands, e-mail: users-help@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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