puffnfresh / node-cgi Goto Github PK

Hi pufuwozu, i think the latest node.js may cause some issues for you.

• node.js v0.5.10-pre changes sys to util but provides warning to that effect
• more seriously and possbily related I'm getting and exception on the "this.listen" method where this is 'undefined'
  at [object Object].listen (/crosswiredigitalmedia.com/public/cgi.js:67:9)

hope this is useful
ngo

I took your project out for a spin because I wanted to use node.js in a shared-host environment, and lured by the promise that I could just replace the http object with node-cgi, thought to try it out. I wrote a script that needed to handle POST data. And it didn't work.

After doing a bit of research on the problem, I learned that when the http object calls a listener, the request object it passes in is a Readable Stream; the stream contains the body of the request (if one is present). What node-cgi does is creates a property Object.

I got myself unstuck by rewriting Request in cgi.js:

var Request = function() {
    var req = process.stdin;
    req.method = process.env['REQUEST_METHOD'];
    req.headers = {
        'host': process.env['HTTP_HOST'],
        'user-agent': process.env['HTTP_USER_AGENT']
    };
    req.url = process.env['REQUEST_URI'];
    return req
};

That code shouldn't go into your cgi class as is without some more work. It's not obvious to me (yet) how to make a copy of process.stdin so that I could add other properties safely.

This code (as well as the original) also lacks all of the headers that might have been passed in from process.env. This would be problematic, for example, if I wanted to add Basic Auth support to my script.

Will you be spending some time making the Request object a bit more powerful?

Would you run npm publish in your node-cgi repo? I figure the author should be the one that publishes this library. Once that is done, I can just list it as a dependency in my project and a npm install will pull in this last library for me.

Thanks!

How do you get POST data?