CGI Environment Extensions for W3Kit

Many configuration parameters of a W3Kit application can be set at runtime through environment variables, as an extension of the CGI standard. During normal operation, these variables are set by a shell script wrapper which in turn exec's the W3Kit application. All the W3Kit-specific variables have names that begin with "W3APP".

These variables are also made available during installation, via the application's Makeconfig file. HTML documents and scripts associated with the application can contain symbolic parameters of the form $(W3APPXXX); the corresponding W3Kit variable will be substituted as the document or script is installed. Here is the current list of standard configuration variables:

W3APPTITLE

The human-readable name of the application, for presentation to users.

W3APPNAME

The name of main application executable. The auxiliary scripts will have names derived from this.

W3APPMAIL

The email address of the maintainer or author of the application. This should be a valid address, suitable as an argument to /bin/mail.

W3APPGROUP

A file permissions group in which the HTTP server's user id is a member. Files and directories that the application needs to change will be made writable by this group during installation.

W3APPBINDIR

The absolute location of the directory which will contain the application's executable scripts (typically /usr/local/etc/httpd/cgi-bin).

W3APPBINURL

The complete URL corresponding to W3APPBINDIR.

W3APPDOCDIR

The absolute location which will be the top of the HTML document tree for this application.

W3APPDOCURL

The complete URL corresponding to W3APPDOCDIR.

W3APPTMPDIR

The absolute location of the scratch directory for this application. Often a directory under W3APPDOCDIR.

W3APPTMPURL

The complete URL corresponding to W3APPTMPDIR.

W3APPCHKDIRS

A TAB-separated list of directories in which to search for documents. This list should generally start with W3APPDOCDIR and W3APPTMPDIR.

W3APPCHKURLS

A TAB-separated list of URLs corresponding to W3APPCHKDIRS.

The Geometry Center Home Page

Author: Paul Burchard
Comments to: webmaster@www.geom.uiuc.edu
Created: Apr 18 1994 --- Last modified: Tue Jun 18 10:24:43 1996