Quickly get up an running using Python's CGIHTTPServer:

python -m CGIHTTPServer

Caveats:

• scripts need to be placed in a sub-folder named cgi-bin/ or htbin/
• every response gets the status 200 Script output follows

As Nginx only supports FastCGI out of the box, we also need to install fcgiwrap.

On Ubuntu: apt-get install nginx fcgiwrap
On Arch: pacman -S nginx fcgiwrap

Example Nginx config (Ubuntu: /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default):

server {
    listen   80;
    server_name  localhost;
    access_log  /var/log/nginx/access.log;

    location / {
        root /srv/static;
        autoindex on;
        index index.html index.htm;
    }

    location ~ ^/cgi {
        root /srv/my_cgi_app;
        rewrite ^/cgi/(.*) /$1 break;

        include fastcgi_params;
        fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/fcgiwrap.socket;
        fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME /srv/my_cgi_app$fastcgi_script_name;
    }
}

Change the root and fastcgi_param lines to a directory containing CGI scripts, e.g. the cgi-bin/ dir in this repository.

If you are a control freak and run fcgiwrap manually, be sure to change fastcgi_pass accordingly. The path listed in the example is the default in Ubuntu when using the out-of-the-box fcgiwrap setup.