MiniVend requires a that a web server be installed on your system in the normal course of events; it does have an internal server which can be used for administration, testing, and maintenance, but you will not want to use it to serve in a production environment.
As detailed previously, MiniVend is always running in the background as a daemon, or resident program. It monitors either a UNIX-domain file-based socket or a series of INET-domain sockets. The small CGI link program, called in the demo simple, is run to connect to one of those sockets and provide the link between your browser.
NOTE: Since Apache and other CERN/NCSA-derived servers are the most popular, we will talk in the terms they use. If you use another web server, you may have to translate the terms; for instance on
MS Personal web server the standard
ScriptAlias is /scripts.
You need to have a ScriptAlias or other
CGI execution capability to use the link program. (The
default ScriptAlias for many web servers is /cgi-bin.) If you have ExecCGI set for all of your directories, then any program ending in a particular
file suffix (usually
.cgi) will be seen as a
CGI program.
MiniVend, by convention, names the link program the same name as the catalog
ID, though this is not required. In the distribution demo, this would yield a program name or
SCRIPT_PATH of
/cgi-bin/simple
or /simple.cgi. This
SCRIPT_PATH can be used to determine which MiniVend
catalog will be used when the link program is accessed.