[Tutor] CGI File Woes

Sun Sep 30 07:30:18 CEST 2007

Hello all,

I am working on a very simple CGI script. The site I want to use it on is a shared linux host, but I confirmed that .py files in the right dir with the right permissions and shebang execute just fine, Hello World sort of tests were successful.

So now something a little more involved:

#!/usr/bin/python2.4

import cgitb; cgitb.enable()

thefile = open("template.html", "r")
templatestuff = thefile.read()
thefile.close()
print "Content-Type: text/html"
if templatestuff:
    print "Found it"
title1 = "I am a title!"
body1 = "I am some hot content"
print templatestuff % (title1, body1)

"template.html" is in the same dir, and is simply:

http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html>
<html>
  <head>
    <title> %s </title>
  </head>
  <body>
                %s
  </body>
</html>

If I run this script without the 3 lines after the import line, it works fine (namely I get an error that templatestuff is not defined, as would be expected). With those lines however, I am getting a 500 Internal Server Error. Since I am not shown an error page with cgitb, this would likely mean a syntax error. However, if I run the script locally, it works just fine, printing out the HTML with variables filled in. Now for the odd part: If I change that open line to "thefile = open("asdas", "r")", I get "IOError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: 'asdas'
". So it seems the script is finding the template file when I have it as above, but is throwing something when it tries to open it. I have confirmed the file has the right permissions, I have even tried it with all permissions set on that file.

I am just totally baffled why I cannot open any files from the script.

Any ideas?
-Sam