Question

I would like to set up a persistent application server running on Mono that needs to be able to accept web requests and return some suitable response. It’s a simple task, and pretty much what FastCGI is for, but I can’t seem to find a FastCGI solution that is not glued together with ASP.NET.

To be extra clear: I am not interested in ASP.NET and do not want to use it or attempt to co-opt any part of the ASP.NET stack. All I really need is a way to interface with a webserver through FastCGI and I can figure out the rest.

Answer 1

While the Mono FastCGI implementation is always packaged with a ASP.NET server, I wrote the code in such a way that it can be used with any sort of server implementation. Here is a basic example that should work. Your request specific code goes in the Process method and you can access FastCGI environment variables through ResponderRequest.GetParameter.

using Mono.FastCgi;

public class MyResponder : IResponder {

    RequestResponder req;

    public MyResponder(RequestResponder req) {
        req = request;
    }

    public int Process() {
        req.SendOutput("Content-Type: text/plain\r\n\r\n");
        req.SendOutput("Server name: ");
        req.SendOutput(req.GetParameter("SERVER_NAME");
        return 0;
    }

    public ResponderRequest Request {
        get {return req;}
    }


    public static void Main() {
        Socket socket = SocketFactory.CreatePipeSocket(IntPtr.Zero);
        //            = SocketFactory.CreateTcpSocket(address, port);
        //            = SocketFactory.CreateUnixSocket(path);

        Server server = new Server(socket);

        server.SetResponder(typeof (MyResponder));
        server.Start(false);
    }
}

To build this example, you can download all the CS files from https://github.com/mono/xsp/tree/master/src/Mono.WebServer.FastCgi and just exclude any files that don’t use the Mono.FastCgi namespace.