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 images and other content.
As detailed previously, MiniVend is always running in the background as a daemon. It monitors either 1) a UNIX-domain file-based socket, located in the etc/ subdirectory; or 2) 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. In the distribution demo, this would yield a program name or
SCRIPT_PATH of
/cgi-bin/simple or /simple.cgi. This
SCRIPT_PATH is used to determine which MiniVend
catalog will be used when the link program is accessed.