CGILua: Building Web Scripts with Lua

Overview

CGILua includes a set of external libraries that allows the handling of authentication, cookies, dispatching, serialized data and sessions. To use these libraries just require them in your CGILua config.lua or script file.

Authentication

cgilua.authentication.check (username, passwd): Checks if the pair username/passwd is authenticated by the configured method.
Returns true if succesfull or nil plus an error message if not.
cgilua.authentication.checkURL (): Returns the URL for the checking script. The checking script receives the current URL as the ref parameter. It is up to the checking script to ask for user credentials, check if the user has the expected credentials (using cgilua.authentication.check (username, passwd) if implementing the checking script using CGILua), and redirect to the original URL (using the ref parameter or cgilua.authentication.refURL() if implementing the checking script using CGILua).
cgilua.authentication.configure (options, methods): Configures the authentication framework (see /examples/authentication_conf.lua in CVS for more information).
cgilua.authentication.logoutURL (): Returns the URL for the logout script.
cgilua.authentication.refURL (): Returns the URL for the page that orignally required authentication. Used in checking scripts that use CGILua. Other checking scripts can use the ref parameter.
cgilua.authentication.username (): Returns the authenticated user or nil if no user is currently authenticated.

Cookies

cgilua.cookies.get (name): Gets the value of the cookie with the given name.
Returns a string with the value of the cookie.
cgilua.cookies.set (name, value[, options]): Sets the value of the cookie with a given name. The optional table options is used togive the values of the cookies attributes: expires, path, domain, secure. This function should be called before the HTTP headers are sent and before any output is generated, so it must not be used inside a Lua Page.
This function sends a cookie with the response. If you need to create a cookie inside the generated response or if the cookie needs to be set inside the client, use cgilua.cookies.sethtml instead.
Returns nothing.
cgilua.cookies.sethtml (name, value[, options]): Sets the value of the cookie with a given name. The optional table options is used to give the values of the cookies attributes: expires, path, domain, secure.
This function generates a <meta> HTML element so it should be called after the <head> HTML tag and before the corresponding </head>.
This function creates a cookie in the client, if you need to send the cookie with the response use cgilua.cookies.set instead.
Returns nothing.
cgilua.cookies.delete (name[, options]): Deletes a cookie with a given name (setting its value to xxx). This function should be called before the HTTP headers are sent and before any output is generated.
Returns nothing.

Dispatcher

cgilua.dispatch.route (urlmaps): Defines the routing using a table of URLs maps or a single map. A map defines a URL mask using $name patterns to extract parameters, a function to be called with the extracted parameters and a name for the map when used with cgilua.dispatch.route_url.
cgilua.dispatch.route_url (mapname, parameters, query): Returns an URL for a named route map. mapname defines the name associated with the map in the original routed URL table sent to cgilua.dispatch.route. params defines a table of named parameters used to fill the URL pattern. query defines an optional table of named parameters used for the QUERY part of the URL.

Serialize

cgilua.serialize (table, outfunc[, indent[, prefix]]): Serializes a table using outfunc as the function to be used to generate the output; indent as an optional string with the indentation pattern; prefix as an optional string with the indentation prefix (it is used to store the actual indentation between the recursion calls).
Some restrictions must be noted: values of types function and userdata are not serialized; tables with cycles are not serialized.
Returns nothing.

Session

cgilua.session.close (): Closes the user session. Saves all data in cgilua.session.data to the storage system being used (usually the filesystem). This function should be called after the end of the script execution. A recommended way to ensure that is to use addclosefunction in the configuration file.
Returns nothing.
cgilua.session.data: Table which holds the user session data.
cgilua.session.delete (id): Deletes a session. The argument id is the session identifier.
Returns nothing.
cgilua.session.destroy (): Destroys the current session.
Returns nothing.
cgilua.session.load (id): Loads data from a session. The argument id is the session identifier.
Returns a table with session data or nil followed by an error message.
cgilua.session.new (): Creates a new session identifier.
Returns the new session identifier.
cgilua.session.open (): Opens the user session. Creates the table cgilua.session.data. This function should be called just before the execution of the script, but after the processing of the request's headers. A recommended way to ensure that is to use addopenfunction in the configuration file.
Returns nothing.
cgilua.session.save (id, data): Saves data to a session with an id.
Returns nothing.
cgilua.session.setsessiondir (path): Defines the session temporary directory. Argument path is a string with the new directory.
Returns nothing.