CGI on Nginx or how to run man2html on debian¶
I don’t enjoy reading manpages, man
has old clunky interface, however do
enjoy reading documentation in html, some good people developen man2html
tool that is a CGI
script that serves man pages in a browser.
This is why in 2015 year I spend part of an evening trying to configure
modern web server to run CGI scripts. This might not be a suprise, that
nginx doesn’t serve CGI by default. It can serve FastCGI
, which is a
streamlied version of CGI, that unfortunately is incompatible with plain
old CGI scripts.
However there were some other good people that wrote fcgiwrap
, which is a
a wrapper that talks FCGI protocol, and then launches plain old cgi
scripts.
So to launch man2html
on Debian, you’ll need to:
- Install required software:
aptitude install man2html nginx-full fcgiwrap
- There is a very good example fcgi config at
/usr/share/doc/fcgiwrap/examples/nginx.conf
, so just copy it to:/etc/nginx/fcgiwrap.conf
- JUst include
/etc/nginx/fcgiwrap.conf
in your server config.