1 [[!meta title="New features on scripts.mit.edu"]]
2 If you develop websites on scripts.mit.edu, we thought you might
3 like to hear about some of the new little features we’ve quietly
4 developed over the last year.
6 - You can now access your website from
7 **yourname.scripts.mit.edu** instead of
8 http://scripts.mit.edu/\~yourname. The new URLs are easier to type
9 and more secure against cross-site scripting attacks. On
10 https://yourname.scripts.mit.edu, current web browsers (supporting
11 [SNI](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Name_Indication)) will
12 receive a valid SSL certificate for \*.scripts.mit.edu. This also
13 works for group lockers.
14 - Setting up **certificate authentication** on scripts is easier
15 than ever. Just [add three lines to your .htaccess file](/faq/15),
16 and your visitors will be automatically redirected to port 444,
17 which accepts optional client certificates. Visitors without
18 certificates will be shown a friendly error page (which you can
19 customize if you want). You can restrict access by user, AFS group,
20 or other standard Apache authorization modules.
21 - A new Apache module supports **optional authentication**. If
23 AuthSSLCertAuthoritative off
26 to your .htaccess file, then the Apache authorization process will
27 be bypassed, so that your script can perform authorization itself,
28 and treat authenticated users differently from anonymous users
29 (which will have the `REMOTE_USER` variable unset).
30 - You can now install **Python modules** into your locker using
31 `easy_install --user` from the scripts servers, and they will be
32 automatically accessible to Python scripts in your locker.
33 - nelhage has made the **Jifty web framework** for Perl available
34 in the [jifty locker](http://jifty.scripts.mit.edu/) for
35 scripts.mit.edu as well as Athena and Debathena.