Apache CGI in user directory “End of script output

Question

I know there are some questions about this topic, but none seems to solve my issue. See this or this or this.

I'm on Linux, Fedora21, and I'm trying to enable per user directory CGI script. I followed these instructions, but without success.

I get the error:

[cgi:error] End of script output before headers: test.cgi

test.cgi is an executable sh file, containing a very simple script:

#!/usr/bin/sh

echo "Content-type: text/plain"
echo ""
echo "Hello"

which has executable flag and runs without problems from shell. I also tried with Python: same result.

I also disabled selinux for good measure.

I also tried setting the debug level to Apache's ErrorLog, but all I get is only "granted" permissions before the error above.

I also configured the /etc/httpd/conf.d/userdir.conf file with

<Directory "/home/*/public_html">
    AllowOverride All
    Options MultiViews Indexes SymLinksIfOwnerMatch IncludesNoExec
    Require all granted
</Directory>

<Directory /home/*/public_html/cgi-bin/>
    Options ExecCGI FollowSymLinks
    SetHandler cgi-script
    AddHandler cgi-script .cgi .exe .pl .py .vbs
    Require all granted
    AllowOverride All
</Directory>

and restarted the server. No success. Everything looks fine to me, I can't understand... What's wrong??

EDIT:

I forgot to add that the issue is just for per-user directory: if I move the same script to /var/www/cgi-bin directory, it works as expected.

EDIT 2:

The shell does exist:

$ ls /usr/bin/sh
/usr/bin/sh

Answer 1

I saw the message "End of script output before headers: myscript.py" for a Python 2.x CGI script that ran fine from the command line.

The problem turned out to be that it wasn't executing correctly by the web server, even though it was from the command-line. Whatever error message the system gave back to the server, it surely didn't pass for CGI headers (e.g., "Content-Type: text/html\r\n\r\n"). Hence, this failure message.

For me, correcting it meant changing the shebang from:

#!/usr/bin/env python

To a more system-specific (but verifiable):

#!/usr/local/bin/python

Perhaps you're encountering something similar.

(FreeBSD 9.x.)

Answer 2

Finally I solved that. Thanks to @JimB, because in his comment he pointed out SUEXEC, which I didn't know about (or simply ignored till now).

After reading a bit the suEXEC documentation, I understood the the problem had to be there. So, I took a look at the configuration:

# suexec -V
 -D AP_DOC_ROOT="/var/www"
 -D AP_GID_MIN=1000
 -D AP_HTTPD_USER="apache"
 -D AP_LOG_SYSLOG
 -D AP_SAFE_PATH="/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin"
 -D AP_UID_MIN=1000
 -D AP_USERDIR_SUFFIX="public_html"

and everything looked Ok (good uid/gid for my user, userdir_suffix is fine, etc). So I took a look at the system logs:

# journalctl -b | grep "suexec"
May 22 11:43:12 caladan suexec[5397]: uid: (1000/user) gid: (1000/user) cmd: test.cgi
May 22 11:43:12 caladan suexec[5397]: directory is writable by others: (/home/user/public_html/cgi-bin)

and that's the problem: my cgi-bin directory was writable by others.

I fixed by simply changing the permissions to 755.

Answer 3

For me, it worked when I changed the shebang line (#!/usr/bin/sh) to #!/usr/bin/env sh. I found that any shebang lines from What is the preferred Bash shebang? seemed to work (however note that sh is different from bash so if you want to use sh stick with it).

So this code worked for me:

#!/usr/bin/env sh
echo "Content-type: text/plain"
echo ""
echo "Hello"

Also, according to the post mentioned above, it seems /usr/bin/env sh seems preferred over /bin/sh. I have no idea about the per directory stuff.

Answer 4

This sometimes comes up when you try to call other Python module methods from your cgi where you might have left some 'print' statements (perhaps for debugging). So scan your code for any 'print' statement, sometimes this fixes the problem easily.

Answer 5

This error occurs when we use print in older way.

print 'your test'

It should be for later version of Python.

print ('your test')

Answer 6

Let only the file owner have write permissions on the cgi script, but not the group, that is -rwxr-xr-x and not -rwxrwxr-x.

In user directories often the group will be a personal user group that only the user is member of anyway, but it seems like Apache gets nervous about seing the g+w bit but gives a somewhat bogus error message about this.