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Integrating FastCGI with Tcl
Integrating FastCGI with Tcl
Michael S. Shanzer
Open Market, Inc.
19 January 1995
Copyright © 1996 Open Market, Inc. 245 First Street, Cambridge, MA 02142 U.S.A.
Tel: 617-621-9500 Fax: 617-621-1703 URL: http://www.openmarket.com/
$Id: fcgi-tcl.htm,v 1.4 2002/02/25 00:42:59 robs Exp $
Tcl (tool command language) is an embeddable scripting language that's often used for CGI programming. Tcl
is freely available as a source kit.
We've built a Tcl interpreter that runs as a FastCGI application. Our purpose in doing so was twofold:
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Create a useful artifact. Open Market has written many CGI applications using Tcl. Now we'd like
to turn them into FastCGI applications.
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Demonstrate how easy it is to integrate FastCGI with an existing program. The Tcl interpreter is a
substantial program, so integrating FastCGI with the Tcl interpreter is a good test of the
fcgi_stdio compatibility library.
We've succeeded on both counts. We now have a platform for migrating our Tcl-based CGI applications to
FastCGI. And the integration required a very small effort. The only source code change to the Tcl interpreter
was the routine addition of a handful of new commands: FCGI_Accept, FCGI_Finish,
FCGI_SetExitStatus, and FCGI_StartFilterData.
The FastCGI-integrated Tcl interpreter works as usual when run from a shell or as a CGI program. You don't
need two Tcls, one for FastCGI and one for other uses.
The remainder of this document gives a recipe you can follow to build FastCGI into Tcl, explains what's
happening in the recipe, and illustrates the use of FastCGI Tcl with an example program.
Here are the assumptions embedded in the following recipe:
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You are building Tcl 7.4p3, the current stable Tcl release as this is written. You unpack the Tcl kit into
a directory tcl7.4 that's a sibling of the FastCGI kit directory fcgi-devel-kit.
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You have gcc version 2.7 installed on your system, and use it in the build. gcc is convenient because it
supports the -include command-line option that instructs the C preprocessor to include a specific
file before processing any other include files. This allows you to include fcgi_stdio.h without
modifying Tcl source files. (The reason for specifying gcc version 2.7 is that I have experienced bad
behavior with an earlier version and the -include flag -- the C preprocessor died with SIGABRT.)
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You have GNU autoconf installed on your system. If you don't have GNU autoconf, you will have to make
certain edits by hand and repeat these edits for each build platform.
If those are valid assumptions, follow these steps:
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Build the FastCGI Developer's Kit. Tcl needs to link against libfcgi.a, so build the FastCGI Developer's Kit in order to create this library for your
platform.
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Pull the Tcl 7.4p3 kit. You'll need the files tcl7.4.tar.Z, tcl7.4p1.patch.gz, tcl7.4p2.patch.gz, and tcl7.4p3.patch.gz. (Some older Netscape browsers
can't perform these retrievals because of a protocol conflict between Netscape and Sun's firewall.)
Unpack the tar file in the parent directory of the FastCGI kit directory you used in the previous step,
so that the directories tcl7.4 and fcgi-devel-kit are siblings. After unpacking the
tar file, follow the directions in the README to apply the patches.
The Tcl/Tk Project Page contains a wealth
of information on Tcl, including up to date information on the latest kits.
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Copy the files tclFCGI.c, tclAppInit.c, Makefile.in, and
configure.in from the FastCGI kit.
> cd tcl7.4
> mv tclAppInit.c tclAppInit.c.orig
> mv Makefile.in.orig Makefile.in.orig.orig
> mv Makefile.in Makefile.in.orig
> mv configure.in configure.in.orig
> cp ../fcgi-devel-kit/tcl/tcl7.4/* .
> cp ../fcgi-devel-kit/tcl/common/* .
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Create a new configure script.
> autoconf
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Configure and build.
> ./configure
> make
The make creates the Tcl interpreter tclsh and library archive libtcl.a (for
embedding Tcl in your own C applications). The Tcl README file explains how you can experiment
with tclsh without installing it in a standard place.
The recipe alone is fine if you are using Tcl 7.4p3, you have gcc version 2.7, and you have GNU autoconf. In
case one or more of these assumptions doesn't hold for you, and to illuminate how little work was involved
in integrating FastCGI, here's an explanation of how and why you would modify the files
tclAppInit.c, Makefile.in, and configure.in from the Tcl kit.
The Tcl program tcl/tiny-tcl-fcgi performs the same function as the C program
examples/tiny-fcgi.c that's used as an example in the FastCGI
Developer's Kit document. Here's what the Tcl version looks like:
#!./tclsh
set count 0
while {[FCGI_Accept] >= 0 } {
incr count
puts -nonewline "Content-type: text/html\r\n\r\n"
puts "<title>FastCGI Hello! (Tcl)</title>"
puts "<h1>FastCGI Hello! (Tcl)</h1>"
puts "Request number $count running on host <i>$env(SERVER_NAME)</i>"
}
If you've built Tcl according to the recipe and you have a Web server set up to run FastCGI applications,
load the FastCGI Developer's Kit Index Page in that server and run this Tcl application now.
The script invokes Tcl indirectly via the symbolic link examples/tclsh. It does this because HP-UX
has a limit of 32 characters for the first line of a command-interpreter file such as
examples/tiny-tcl-fcgi. If you run on HP-UX you won't want to sprinkle symbolic links to
tclsh everywhere, so you should install tclsh with a shorter pathname than
/usr/local/tcl7.4-fcgi/bin/tclsh7.4.
The Tcl command FCGI_Accept treats the initial environment differently than the C function
FCGI_Accept. The first call to the C function FCGI_Accept replaces the initial environment
with the environment of the first request. The first call to the Tcl command FCGI_Accept adds the
variable bindings of the first request to the bindings present in the initial environment. So when the first
call to FCGI_Accept returns, bindings from the initial environment are still there (unless, due to
naming conflicts, some of them have been overwritten by the first request). The next call to
FCGI_Accept removes the bindings made on the previous call before adding a new set for the request
just accepted, again preserving the initial environment.
The FastCGI-integrated tclsh also includes commands FCGI_Finish,
FCGI_SetExitStatus, and FCGI_StartFilterData that correspond to C functions in
fcgi_stdio.h; see the manpages for full information.
Converting a Tcl CGI application to FastCGI is not fundamentally different from converting a C CGI
application. You separate the portion of the application that performs one-time initialization from the
portion that performs per-request processing. You put the per-request processing into a loop controlled by
FCGI_Accept.
Mike Shanzer // shanzer@openmarket.com
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