Running Your Own Webserver

1  Using a Mac or Linux computer to run R CGI programs

If you'd like to run your CGI programs on your own computer before moving them over to the SCF computers where I can test them, it's fairly easy to do on Mac or Linux systems. (If you've got Cygwin installed on a Windows computer, you can find information for setting things up here.)

2  Linux

First make sure that the apache2 program is installed on your system. If you're already running a webserver, then you're all set. After installing the CGIwithR package in R, you'll need to copy two files from the installation to your system's cgi area. These two files can be found in /usr/local/lib/R/site-library/CGIwithR/cgi-bin, and they are called R.cgi and .Rprofile. Copy these two files to /usr/lib/cgi-bin. You can now add your R scripts to that same directory and access them as http://localhost/cgi-bin/R.cgi/scriptname.cgi, where scriptname.cgi is the name of your CGI script.

3  Mac

To activate the apache webserver that's part of Mac OS X, open the System Preferences pane (through the Apple menu), and choose the "Sharing" preference. Click on "Web Sharing" to start the webserver. After installing the CGIwithR package in R, you'll need to copy two files from the installation to your system's cgi area. These two files can be found in /Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Version/Current/Resources/library/CGIwithR/cgi-bin, and they are called R.cgi and .Rprofile. Copy these two files to /Library/WebServer/CGI-Executables. In the file R.cgi, find the line that looks like this:
R_DEFAULT=/usr/local/bin/R

and change it to
R_DEFAULT=/usr/bin/R

You can now add your R scripts to that same directory, and your HTML files in /Library/Webserver/Documents. You can then access the html files as http://localhost/file.html where file.html is the name of your html file, and the CGI files as http://localhost/cgi-bin/R.cgi/scriptname.cgi, where scriptname.cgi is the name of your CGI script.


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On 3 May 2011, 11:31.