Bloggings

Gemini - The protocol not the AI

2023-12-09

Playing with a Gemini server today. I'm not entirely convinced, but in the interest of research, here goes:

First I opened port 1965 on the server

ufw allow 1965
+

I created the user gemini on the server and created the folders bin, certs, and gemini in /var/gemini

I downloaded the x86_64 linux binary from github and moved it to /var/gemini/bin.

In /var/gemini/content I creatd the text file index.gmi with just "hello world" in it.

Then I did a first run of Gemini

+/var/gemini/bin/agate --content /var/gemini/content/ --certs /var/gemini/certs --hostname wittamore.fr --lang en-GB +

Agate Auto created it's required certificates, and using the gemini browser Amfora I saw the "hello world!" text.

So I added a systemd file to manage the execution of Agate:

[Unit]
+Description=agate
+After=network.target
+
+[Service]
+User=gemini
+Type=simple
+ExecStart=/var/gemini/bin/agate --content /var/gemini/content/ --certs /var/gemini/certs --hostname wittamore.fr --lang en-GB
+
+[Install]
+WantedBy=default.target
+

And launched it

systemctl enable agate.service
+systemctl start agate.service
+

+ +

Agate is a very simple Gemini server. It automatically creates self-signed certificates for TLS in the .der format, +which makes it clumsy if you have letsencrypt certificates in .pem format available.

openssl rsa -outform der -in privkey.pem -out key.der
+openssl x509 -outform der -in cert.pem -out cert.der
+

Unlike Gopher, none of the servers available appear to be mature yet, which is probably due to the relatively new protocol.

The Flounder site shows some interesting possibilities for Gemini.

+ +