The recommended way to have a web-server run a Kawa program as a CGI script is to compile the Kawa program to a servlet (as explained in Server-side scripts, and then use Kawa’s supplied CGI-to-servlet bridge.

First, compile your program to one or more class files as explained in Server-side scripts. For example:

kawa --servlet --xquery -C hello.xql

Then copy the resulting .class files to your server’s CGI directory. On Red Hat GNU/Linux, you can do the following (as root):

cp hello*.class /var/www/cgi-bin/

Next find the cgi-servlet program that Kawa builds and installs. If you installed Kawa in the default place, it will be in /usr/local/bin/cgi-servlet. (You’ll have this if you installed Kawa from source, but not if you’re just using Kawa .jar file.) Copy this program into the same CGI directory:

cp /usr/local/bin/cgi-servlet /var/www/cgi-bin/

You can link instead of copying:

ln -s /usr/local/bin/cgi-servlet /var/www/cgi-bin/

However, because of security issues this may not work, so it is safer to copy the file. However, if you already have a copy of cgi-servlet in the CGI-directory, it is safe to make a hard link instead of making an extra copy.

Make sure the files have the correct permissions:

chmod a+r /var/www/cgi-bin/hello*.class /var/www/cgi-bin/hello
chmod a+x /var/www/cgi-bin/hello

Now you should be able to run the Kawa program, using the URL http://localhost/cgi-bin/hello. It may take a few seconds to get the reply, mainly because of the start-up time of the Java VM. That is why servlets are preferred. Using the CGI interface can still be useful for testing or when you can’t run servlets.