Install Perl on Personal Web Server (PWS) in Windows 98

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This is the post that started this site. This is very old, and you are crazy if you are running old versions of Windows. Once I was e-mailed from a guy that told me this quick little tip was his salvation after he spend hours and hours.

When I first got into web programming I used Perl. Since then I have done JSP and PHP. For quick testing of my Perl code I liked to run it locally and at the time I had Windows 98.

Windows 98 has a striped down version of Internet Information Server (IIS) called Personal Web Server (PWS).

  1. Install Personal Web Server from either the Windows 98 CD-ROM or from the Microsoft website. The location on the CD-ROM is [driveletter]:\add-ons\pws\setup.exe.

  2. Download and install ActivePerl from www.activestate.com.

  3. Click Start, Run then type regedit and click OK.

  4. Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE / System / CurrentControlSet / Services / W3SVC / Parameters / Script Map.

  5. Create a new String Value named .pl with a value of C:\Perl\bin\perlis.dll.

  6. Change the drive letter and location to where ever perlis.dll is installed. I did this many years ago so the current download of ActivePerl might be different. You can also do the same for .cgi if you want.

  7. Exit out of regedit and reboot the computer. Very important, you must reboot.

  8. Open the PWS Manager, click Advanced. Choose or create a directory you want the Perl scripts to run in. Check only Execute and click OK. If you want HTML in the same directory check Read as well, no need for Scripts.

  9. That is it, everything should work.

Enjoy!