● CGI in 2026

210 2026-08-01 note ♈︎ ♄︎

CGIThe Common Gateway Interface is a 1993 protocol for running a program per HTTP request, standardized in 2004 as RFC 3875. The server forks a process, passes the request in as environment variables and stdin, and reads headers plus a… never fully died, it retreated to admin tooling and old Apache corners.

Jake Gold benchmarked compiled-language CGI at 2,400+ requests/sec, half a billion a day, once you're not spawning an interpreter per request.

The Navigator project revived real CGI for admin scripts in 2025: per-request process isolation, scripts running as different Unix users, no framework left to patch.

Old Perl and Python CGI still quietly handles form posts on servers nobody's touched in years. Python dropped its cgi module from the standard library in 3.13, finally forcing some of that code to move.

The reputation for insecurity is mostly misplaced. The real bugs are command injection and unescaped output, the same classes any handler can have.

See Minimal CGI ScriptThe whole CGI contract in one script: read the environment, print headers, print a blank line, print a body. python #!/usr/bin/env python3 import os query = os.environ.get("QUERYSTRING", "") print("Content-Type: text/plain") print() print(f"Hello from CGI. Query string: {query}") Apache or any… for the shape of the actual interface.