Following up on my CGI-Lisp work, here’s a short recipe on how to route the entire Apache traffic to a CGI handler. This is not trivial because of a few problems that need solving:

1. <code>mod_actions</code> will fall into infinite loop if you try to associate a handler with <code><Location /></code> (as will <code>mod_rewrite</code> if you attempt to rewrite <code>/.*</code>)
2. <code>mod_rewrite</code> will not execute CGI scripts by default
3. <code>mod_rewrite</code> only serves physical paths under <code>DocumentRoot</code> (and it’s good practice not to have <code>/cgi-bin/</code> under DocumentRoot)

These can be all solved, but require some searching and reading into the meaning of various options, so I’m posting a ready solution here:

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ...
    DocumentRoot /var/www/
    ...

    RewriteEngine On
    # PT means "passthrough" and will allow mod_rewritten URLs to be matched by
    # virtual locations, not just physical paths
    # T= specifies mime-type to ensure the CGI handler will be executed
    # sock.cgi is the handler we want to handle the entire traffic
    RewriteRule ^/(.*) /cgi-bin/sock.cgi/$1 [PT,T=application/x-httpd-cgi]

    ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ /usr/lib/cgi-bin/
    <Directory "/usr/lib/cgi-bin">
        AllowOverride None
        #Add whatever options you normally use for your /cgi-bin/
        Options +ExecCGI -MultiViews +SymLinksIfOwnerMatch
        Order allow,deny
        Allow from all
    </Directory>

As an added bonus, it seems that the <code>REQUEST_URI</code> sent is the URL before rewriting, so you don’t have to do anything special to filter out <code>/cgi-bin/sock.cgi</code> from it.

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