How do I serve an image from the cgi directory under Tomcat?

Question

I have configured Tomcat 6 to serve Perl CGI scripts. That part is well documented and works ok for me.

But, when a browser requests an image from this CGI dir, Tomcat's CGI servlet refuses to serve the image, displaying instead merely the url of the image. I believe this is a security feature to prevent users from seeing the contents of such files in general.

How do I configure tomcat, the tomcat CGI servlet, and/or the tomcat default servlet, to actually serve up an image file which happens to be located in my CGI dir? Is that possible?

Answer 1

Why do you want to put images inside your CGI directory? Shouldn't they be under the normal document root?

If you are constructing relative paths in the output of your script, add a BASE tag to the HTML head, or make the links absolute URLs.

Answer 2

Thanks for your response, Brian.

By way of additional background to my question: I'm trying to run the CGI web application Bugzilla. It keeps its images in a folder called 'images' located in the same dir as the .cgi scripts. That arrangement works under the apache webserver, and I'd like to make it work under tomcat too.

Or at least, I'd like to avoid hacking the .cgi scripts which belong to bugzilla web app.

Answer 3

Since the Bugzilla Guide includes configuration guidelines for only Apache and MS IIS and google doesn't turn up any posts discussing successful deployment, your best bet would probably be to stick with a documented and supported configuration, Apache or IIS.

Answer 4

Resolution: I gave up on my "single server" (i.e. the existing Tomcat server) approach and installed Apache as well. Naturally, Bugzilla works much more readily under Apache. No real surprise there.

I conclude that:

1. Apache has no problem serving image files from under a cgi-bin dir.

2. Bugzilla developers don't seem to think it's bad to put the image file dir in with the application scripts.

3. Tomcat's support for cgi-bin is not as rich/extensive as Apache's.

4. The answer to my original question is: it cannot be done in Tomcat 6.

Answer 5

OK, I have written a short how-to on installing Bugzilla on Apache Tomcat 6 (on Ubuntu 10.04 + MysSQL).

I was playing around with the BZ instance and it seems to be functioning normally.

http://blog.inmite.eu/2010/08/installing-bugzilla-on-the-apache-tomcat-6/

Good luck!

petr@inmite[dot]eu