● CGI Scripts

204 2026-08-01 note ♈︎ ♄︎

The 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 body back off stdout.

No runtime or framework, nothing beyond that.

See CGI in 2026CGI 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 whether it's still worth reaching for, Static Site GeneratorsA static site generator takes markdown and templates and compiles them into plain HTML files with no server-side code and no database. For a digital garden that's meant to be worked on continuously, the boring reliability is a great asset.… for the opposite end of the dynamic-content spectrum, and Tildeverse GuestbookA shared guestbook on a tildeverse server lets users add entries through a controlled script rather than direct file editing. The script logs who added entries and when, preventing accidental deletion while maintaining attribution. See guestbook-add-script for the implementation, guestbook-file-permissions… for a practical non-web CGI use case.