A test suite for HTTP and CGI development
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cg-eye is a test harness for HTTP and CGI. It may be used as an intermediate stage between running your software from the commandline and putting it online, and will diagnose a number of potential problems.
cg-eye has three components:
A test harness to simulate a CGI environment offline, without the need for a browser or HTTP server. See also Tom Christiansen's Idiot's Guide.
An online harness to specify an HTTP request to send to your server and print diagnostics on the server's response.
An online harness to intercept a request from a browser (normally generated "live" from an HTML form) and forward it to your server. Details of both the Request and the server's Response are printed.
Make sure your program runs OK from the commandline.
If it's anything more complicated than HelloWorld, use the offline facilities of your CGI library to run tests.
Run the program under cg-eye offline, and take note of anything it tells you.
If your development machine is different from the webserver, you'll need to repeat at least the first step on the webserver itself. If your program requires data files or external programs, make sure you have enough test cases to include accessing them.
Check the program via HTTP using cg-eye interactive.
Check the program with your form(s) using cg-eye live.
Tell me if you find a problem you think cg-eye should have identified but didn't.
For non-trivial programs you should of course use development methods appropriate to your project.
Please see the CGI Programming FAQ
(and other resources referenced therein) before asking for help.
Try the newsgroup comp.infosystems.www.authoring.cgi, and the
comp.infosystems.www.servers.* hierarchy.
You can download cg-eye source code here.
