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X-Sendfile support

Trex-512

24 January 2016, 14:59

Hello. Is there anyway to bail out of a CGI application and make the server serve a static file instead? Other servers have the X-Sendfile header, but this does not seem to work. I have seen an old post in the subject, but there was no followup there: https://www.hiawatha-webserver.org/forum/topic/948

A huge use-case for this is caching CGI responses like in this example hello.cgi:

#!/bin/bash
CACHENAME=cache/hello_cached.html""

#If cache is older than 30 minutes
if [ "`find -name $CACHENAME -mmin +30`" ]; then
	printf '<html>' >> $CACHENAME
	printf '<head>' >> $CACHENAME
	printf '<title>Hello World</title>' >> $CACHENAME
	printf '</head>' >> $CACHENAME
	printf '<body>' >> $CACHENAME
	printf 'Hello World' >> $CACHENAME
	printf '</body>' >> $CACHENAME
	printf '</html>' >> $CACHENAME
fi


printf "x-sendfile: $CACHENAME\r\n\r\n"
	exit 0


exit 0

Trex-512

24 January 2016, 15:00

Note that this is just an exmaple. a cpu-heavy operation can be done inside the if block.

Hugo Leisink

24 January 2016, 15:01

You can redirect to that file via a Location header.

printf "Location: /path/to/file.ext\r\n\r\n"

Trex-512

24 January 2016, 15:11

But this redirects the client. I don't want the client to know the difference, and in fact the cache folder can be outside the server root dir.

Trex-512

24 January 2016, 15:24

Note for everyone, for the record: For the specific usage of cgi caching, X-Hiawatha-Cache is available.

But X-Sendfile would still be nice for other use cass.

Hugo Leisink

24 January 2016, 15:44

I implemented support for it. It will be available in v10.1.

Trex-512

24 January 2016, 19:58

Thank you for the fast response

Note that it may be subject to the same problem as this one:
https://www.hiawatha-webserver.org/forum/topic/2156

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