CGI stands for Common Gateway Interface, it’s the mechanism that the web server uses to pass requests received by the server off to any script interpreter (e.g PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby, etc).
Here is where the CGI fits into the request process:
- The web browser sends a request off to the web server
- The web server received the request
- The web server sends the request off to the CGI program (e.g PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby, etc)
- The program passes the output back to the web server
- The web server passes the output back to the web browser
