Week 11: Forms and 403's

This week our goal was to get some code working on our local server and eventually start creating an app that could process the encryption parameters sent to us from the Canvas test modules.

Using the tutorials from here and here, we were able to create a very basic web form and have it appear on our local test-website.local:

Unfortunately, once we had a test website working, we were no longer able to access the default local server on my operating system (Mac OSX). 

We think this has something to do with how we enabled apache and cgi, but we made so many changes without going through bash that it's harder to step backward and error check.  We tried changing the permissions via the terminal, but still no luck:

Even more mind-boggling is that the permissions work on my mentor's system even though we made all the same changes. We tried re-working through several tutorials: here, here, here, and here to enable apache without any success.  Our final hope is to update my operating system to 10.9, which will reset apache, and just start again from scratch (feels like the case of the missing bracket all over again). We're also going to try posting our error to apple.stackexchange and see if we can get some more detailed feedback.

On the app front, I wrote a short bit of code that will hopefully seek out the necessary parameters and write them to a file: 

Unfortunately, we have no way to test this code until we get our server up-and-running properly. What a world!

Goals for next week:

1. Update operating system in order reset apache2 and cgi
2. Test and tweak app to gather necessary Canvas parameters