LiteSpeed comes with a persistent Perl CGI daemon which can run perl CGI script without modification, just like mod_perl in Apache.

If you configure LSWS to run perl under control panel environment, such as cPanel, you need to configure it as a Fast CGI application, and then add a script handler for “pl” or whatever suffixes used for Perl scripts. The Perl CGI daemon is located at

/usr/local/lsws/fcgi-bin/lsperld.fpl

Restart LSWS, then done.

For LSWS native cofiguration, you also need to procede the above step to setup Fast CGI application and then add a script handler for “pl”.

As “lsperld.fpl” utilizes the Fast CGI interface, it has normally been configured on control panel environment already. However you may need to install Perl Fast CGI module FCGI.pm first in LSWS + bare OS situation since it may not be installed.

Perl Fast CGI module is available at CPAN(Comprehensive Perl Archive Network).

On CentOS7, to add perl-CPAN package first.

yum install epel-release
yum install gcc
yum install perl-CPAN

The following command can be used to install FCGI.pm through CPAN:

perl -MCPAN -e 'install FCGI' 

On CentOS box, you can easily install perl-CGI and perl-FCGI packages through:

yum install perl-CGI

Verify the installed location of FCGI.pm.

find / -name FCGI.pm
/usr/lib64/perl5/vendor_perl/FCGI.pm

In order to deal with increasing memory usage of a persistent process, the number of requests that a Perl daemon can process is controlled by an environment variable FCGI_PERL_MAX_REQ, the default is 500. For example: FCGI_PERL_MAX_REQ=1000.

Restart LSWS to make the change effective.

Without perl-CPAN package installed, the above installation may run into the following error:

Can't locate CPAN.pm in @INC (@INC contains: /usr/local/lib64/perl5 /usr/local/share/perl5 /usr/lib64/perl5/vendor_perl /usr/share/perl5/vendor_perl /usr/lib64/perl5 /usr/share/perl5 .).
BEGIN failed--compilation aborted.

Without installing FCGI.pm, you may run into the following error in stderr.log and 503 error on screen.

 [STDERR] Can't locate FCGI.pm in @INC (@INC contains: /usr/local/lib64/perl5 /usr/local/share/perl5 /usr/lib64/perl5/vendor_perl /usr/share/perl5/vendor_perl /usr/lib64/perl5 /usr/share/perl5 .) at /usr/local/lsws/fcgi-bin/lsperld.fpl line 3