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# Setup for HTTP Servers

MiniVend requires a that a web server be installed on your system in the normal course of events; it does have an internal server which can be used for administration, testing, and maintenance, but you will not want to use it to serve in a production environment.

As detailed previously, MiniVend is always running in the background as a daemon, or resident program. It monitors either a UNIX-domain file-based socket or a series of INET-domain sockets. The small CGI link program, called in the demo simple, is run to connect to one of those sockets and provide the link between your browser.

NOTE: Since Apache and other CERN/NCSA-derived servers are the most popular, we will talk in the terms they use. If you use another web server, you may have to translate the terms; for instance on MS Personal web server the standard `ScriptAlias` is `/scripts`.

You need to have a `ScriptAlias` or other CGI execution capability to use the link program. (The default `ScriptAlias` for many web servers is `/cgi-bin`.) If you have `ExecCGI` set for all of your directories, then any program ending in a particular file suffix (usually .cgi) will be seen as a CGI program.

MiniVend, by convention, names the link program the same name as the catalog ID, though this is not required. In the distribution demo, this would yield a program name or SCRIPT_PATH of `/cgi-bin/simple` or `/simple.cgi`. This SCRIPT_PATH can be used to determine which MiniVend catalog will be used when the link program is accessed.

- UNIX-domain sockets
- INET-domain sockets
- Internal HTTP server
- Setting up VLINK and TLINK
- Compiling VLINK and TLINK
- Manually compiling VLINK and TLINK

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