Simple python web server doesn't execute CGI scripts

Question

I set up a python web server by opening a terminal in a directory and doing

python -m CGIHTTPServer

There is a CGI script in the directory but when I type into the browser

localhost:8000/script.cgi

The CGI script is not executed but is downloaded instead. I chmod'ed the script to 755 but still the same. What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

From its documentation:

The class will however, run the CGI script, instead of serving it as a file, if it guesses it to be a CGI script. Only directory-based CGI are used — the other common server configuration is to treat special extensions as denoting CGI scripts.

The do_GET() and do_HEAD() functions are modified to run CGI scripts and serve the output, instead of serving files, if the request leads to somewhere below the cgi_directories path. [...]

cgi_directories: This defaults to ['/cgi-bin', '/htbin'] and describes directories to treat as containing CGI scripts.