From what you've told us so far, it looks like you just want an HTML form and a CGI to process it and then send some HTML back to the user.

You don't need to complicate things too much. Just set up FastCGI with your scripting language of choice, and don't worry about sending back an HTTP status code to NGINX. The web server needs to know the code only if you're going to implement error pages for common HTTP errors. Most of the time you just send a human-readable error message with your HTML.

--
Javi Lavandeira

Twitter: @javilm
Blog: http://www.lavandeira.net/blog

On 2012/08/20, at 21:33, Bob Stanton <farseas@gmail.com> wrote:

> How else would you do it?
>
> I don't want to use basic_auth because I want to be able to style my own form.
>
>
>
> On Mon, Aug 20, 2012 at 7:06 AM, Javi Lavandeira <javi@lavandeira.net> wrote:
> Make your CGI/PHP/Python/Perl script return a "Status: xxx" header.
>
> I'm curious, why do you need to do it this way?
>
>
> --
> Javi Lavandeira
>
> Twitter: @javilm
> Blog: http://www.lavandeira.net/blog
>
> On 2012/08/20, at 19:42, Bob Stanton <farseas@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Sorry for my lack of precision. I know how to do all the below, I just don't know how to tell nginx whether or not user authentication was successful.
>>
>> On Mon, Aug 20, 2012 at 12:45 AM, Javi Lavandeira <javi@lavandeira.net> wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>> On 2012/08/20, at 6:32, Bob Stanton <farseas@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> I specifically want to supply my own form, get the username and PW, check it against my DB with a CGI program, and then pass values back to Nginx.
>>
>> Do you mean that you want to know how to create an HTML form, pass the parameters to a CGI, and then return an HTML output to the user?
>>
>> Regards,
>>
>> --
>> Javi Lavandeira
>>
>> Twitter: @javilm
>> Blog: http://www.lavandeira.net/blog
>>
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