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Can someone point me to some nice tutorial about CGI using C++!
Tahnk you.

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As noted, a walkthrough is a good place to start. A few practical points that are easy to miss when moving from tutorials into real deployment:

Classic CGI vs persistent services — classic CGI spawns a new process per request (simple, but slow). For anything beyond experiments, consider FastCGI or a C++ web framework that runs as a persistent server (Wt, or your own small HTTP server using Boost.Asio/Boost.Beast). Use a small parsing library (for example, cgicc-style libraries) instead of hand‑parsing multipart/form-data.

Minimal checklist and a tiny C++ skeleton to test basic CGI behavior:

  • Compile for the target server and place the binary in the server's cgi-bin (or a directory with ExecCGI enabled).
  • Set executable bits (chmod 755) and ensure ownership/SELinux context allow execution.
  • Always output a blank line after headers (Content-Type: ...\r\n\r\n), or the server will error.
#include <iostream>
#include <cstdlib>
#include <string>

int main() {
    std::cout << "Content-Type: text/html\r\n\r\n";
    const char* qs = std::getenv("QUERY_STRING");
    if (qs) std::cout << "<p>Query: " << qs << "</p>\n";

    const char* clen = std::getenv("CONTENT_LENGTH");
    if (clen) {
        int len = std::atoi(clen);
        std::string body;
        body.resize(len);
        std::cin.read(&body[0], len);
        std::cout << "<p>Post body: " << body << "</p>\n";
    }
    return 0;
}

Common deployment/troubleshooting notes: free shared hosts rarely permit compiled C++ CGI because of security and dependency issues; consider a low-cost VPS or a free cloud VM for testing. If a CGI binary gives a 500, check the server error log first — common causes are wrong permissions, missing blank header/body separator, wrong interpreter/architecture, or missing shared libraries. For production, avoid spawning heavy processes per request: use FastCGI or a persistent server model, and always validate and sanitize input to prevent injection or overflow bugs.

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Member Avatar for Daishi

Looks like a good place to start.

-Fredric

Member Avatar for cppforlife

Thank you Daishi
It realy good tutorial but i have another question.

Do you know some free web hosting like geocities but that supports c/c++?

Thank you again!

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