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[ANN] The Duckling Proxy

Luke Emmet luke at marmaladefoo.com

Mon Aug 31 22:41:39 BST 2020

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Hi All

I'm pleased to announce The Duckling Proxy 🦆 - a scheme-specific proxy to access HTTP resources from normal Gemini clients.

Motivated by my recent discussion on the merits of opening up access to the Small Web in a sane way. One option is to plug an adapter into your client, the other is to use a scheme specific proxy.

gemini://gemini.marmaladefoo.com/blog/31-Aug-2020_The_Duckling_Proxy.gmi

So any Gemini client that supports scheme specific proxies should be able to connect to Duckling. Another example of a scheme-specific proxy is Solderpunk's Agena proxy which allows access to gopher:// resources. Duckling works in a similar way.

Once your proxy is in place and running, and you have configured your client to use it, you can request http resources using normal Gemini request:

Client: <http-url><crlf>Server: 20 text/gemini...continues...

Duckling translates all web pages into gemtext, so it is just a normal Gemini server, as far as your client is concerned.

View the Small Web using your favourite Gemini client, and benefit from:

No tracking or cookies* No javascript* No server styling, just content* No client headers

Obviously, not every web site will work as expected, especially those requiring client side javascript/cookies/forms in order to work effectively. In this case, just launch your normal web browser. Or maybe give those pages a miss anyway?

Currently the following clients can be used with Duckling Proxy

AV-98 - apply the patch from the source repo then use `set http_proxy machine:port` to access* diohsc - edit diohscrc config file* gemget - use -p option* GemiNaut (unreleased build, coming soon, PM me if you want early access)

Any other clients that implement proxy support in the future should be able to use it. I understand Amfora will be able to connect to it in an upcoming release. Let me know if you implement proxy support in your client and I'll add it to the list.

Best Wishes

- Luke