Basic CGI with Lua

Question

I need a very light web solution to run on a Linux appliance to handle HTML forms, so intend to use uwsgi and Lua.

In the CGI script, this article uses the following code:

print ("Content-type: Text/html\n")
print ("Hello, world!")

However, this works too:

print("Status: 200 OK\r\n\r\nHello, world!\r\n")

I'd like to know what CGI scripts are really required to return to the web server.

Thank you.

Answer 1

You don't need a header at all, the only thing you really need is the blank line that ends the header and starts the body:

print ("\nHello, World")

should work as well.

However, you should at least include the Content-type including the character set, since browsers should default to iso-8859-1, but the user may override this, and you should use utf-8 to avoid being restricted in what characters you can display.

print("Content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8")

Also, if you're programming an appliance, you probably want to avoid caching, so i'd spend an extra

print("Cache-control: no-cache")
print("Pragma: no-cache")

which prevents browsers and proxies from caching your page.