DBCGI

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About

I am a sysadmin for a local police dept. and maintain a great number of databases. Most of these are small and have only a few fields, but need to be updated regularly and by many different people. I usually ended up having to write a cgi script so that everyone could access it online, but it became tiresome to keep updating the script as the database changed or bugs in my script came out. So I created a perl script that did this but read in all it's configuration from a text file instead of having it hard coded into the cgi script. That way, if anything changed, I could just update the config file. As I started adding features and the program started rounding out, I decided to release it so everyone could use it, as it's pretty handy.

Download

latest version
sample config (well commented)

How to

This documentation is very incomplete. I am just starting this project and plan on writing better docs when I have a chance, but for now, this should get you started.

This howto assumes that your mysql and apache servers are installed, configured, and set up correctly on your system, and that you know the location of your cgi-bin (usually /var/www/cgi-bin or /usr/lib/cgi-bin).  You must also have a user created in mysql with permissions to the database you want to use.  If you do not plan on requiring a login to use db.cgi, make sure that the apache user has access to your database as well (usually this can be accomplished by adding apache@% (ODBC@% for IIS users) to mysql and giving it permission to your database).  Also, remember to rename db.cgi-version to db.cgi.

The following steps should give you a working setup:

1. Use the sample config above (under download) to create your config.  The file is well commented and should be easy to set up.
2. Create a folder within your cgi-bin to house your config file and db.cgi.
3. Make sure that the first line of db.cgi points to your copy of perl (usually /usr/bin/perl, so the first line should be fine).
4. Copy both the config file (must be named config) and db.cgi into the directory you just created.
5. As root (or any other user with permission to change permissions on files in your cgi-bin), cd into the directory you just created and run:
        chmod a+x db.cgi
   
   
6. Assuming your config file is set up correctly, everything should work if you just point your browser to db.cgi (for example, if you put your files in /path/to/cgi-bin/mydb, then point your browser to http://localhost/cgi-bin/mydb/db.cgi.
7. Windows users:  if you have Perl installed and configured in IIS, you will need to add a binding for .cgi extensions (if you installed ActivePerl, there should already be a binding for .pl, so simply make an identical one for .cgi files).  You can edit your bindings from within the IIS Manager snap in (in Administrative Tools).  Right click on your default website on the left panel, and choose properties.  Then go to the Home Directory tab (no idea why MS decided to put script bindings in the Home Directory tab) and click the Configuration button.  There will be a list of bindings (i.e. file extensions with the commands used to execute them).  Click Add.  Under extensions, put .cgi.  Under executable, put C:\Perl\bin\perl.exe "%s" %s, replacing the path to the perl executable with the correct path to yours (c:\perl\bin\per.exe is the default installation path for ActivePerl).  You will also have to edit the db.cgi file some to make it work in Windows (at least my experience has shown this).  Actually, you only really need to delete that first line (#!/usr/bin/perl -T).  Just open db.cgi in notepad or whatever text editor you want and delete that first line.  The rest should work just fine in Windows (I think).
   

Support

Visit the forums to post any questions, comments, or problems.

To Do

• Create a script to help write the config file
• Fix rollover highlighting so it works in other browsers (note: done for all browsers but konqueror as of 0.3 release)
• Clean up code with css (note: started work on this in release 0.3)
• Add code to save searches to config file
• Add code to automatically guess the field type instead of having it in the config file (note: started this in 0.3 - need to work around html links since there is no equiv. type in mysql)

This is alpha software!

This script could blow up your computer, set your house on fire, nuke your database, steal your kids and kill your cat. It is in the early stages of development and I make no guarantees of its fitness for any purpose. I make no promises that it will work at all. Use this program at your own risk!