Tran­si­tion to nginx: part 4 – CGI scripts

I still have some CGI scripts on this web­site. They still work, and they are good enough for my needs. When I switched this web­site to nginx (the word­press set­up was a lit­tle bit more com­plex than what I wrote in part 1, part 2 and part 3… the con­fig will be one of my next blog posts) I was a lit­tle bit puz­zled how to do that with nginx. It took me some min­utes to get an idea how to do it and to find the right FreeB­SD port for this.

• Install www/fcgiwrap
• Add the fol­low­ing to rc.conf:

fcgiwrap_enable="YES"
fcgiwrap_user="www"

• Run “ser­vice fcgi­wrap start”
• Add the fol­low­ing to your nginx config:

location ^~ /cgi-bin/ {
    gzip off; #gzip makes scripts feel slower since they have to complete before getting gzipped
    fastcgi_pass  unix:/var/run/fcgiwrap/fcgiwrap.sock;
    fastcgi_index index.cgi;
    fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME /path/to/location$fastcgi_script_name;
    fastcgi_param GATEWAY_INTERFACE  CGI/1.1;
}