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My Gemini Server Setup

2021-02-18

How this all started

I like it minimalistic, maybe that's the reason why Gemini fascinated me so easily. I first heard about it in an episode of Distrotube on Youtube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iq1k_FCWPXk

It immediately catched me, and later I found this video from Chris Were describing how to set up the Gemini server agate:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldPlP4xVIag

After this video, I made the decision to be part of the Gemini space.

My setup

Honestly, to the description of Chris Were in the above mentioned video there is not more to add. It provides a sound guide for setting up the Gemini server agate. I mainly changed some pathes. When you are here, you are most probably also already in the Gemini space (using a Gemini browser), so it might interest you, that you find the description from Chris Were also in a page in his capsule:

gemini://chriswere.uk/gemserver.gmi

Background: I own a 24/7 "server" at home - it is actually a small Intel NUC with a quad core Celeron processor running Debian Linux in headless mode. It is small, thrifty and sufficient for my needs. It mainly serves as a file server (Nextcloud) and hosts the SSH user for my command line mail client mutt I can remotely access from every machine.

This is a summary of the main adaptations to the description of Chris Were:

First of all, I decided to create a dedicated system user "agate" on my server. The shell is set to /bin/false to disallow login via this user.
I put the agate binary in /opt/agate and created a symlink in /usr/local/bin
The server data is stored in /var/gemini. The certificate and keyfile are placed in /var/gemini/certs, the Gemini files in /var/gemini/gmi. /var/gemini is writable for every user in the group agate. My standard user account was added to this group.
The systemd script for agate was adapted accordingly.

Because I protect all my machines with a firewall, I had to open port tcp/1965 in my server. I also configured a port forwarding rule on my router to finally have my agate server accesible from outside.

Outlook

Agate is really a Gemini server easy to set up. For my small Gemini capsule it is sufficient (for now).

https://github.com/mbrubeck/agate

As of now, agate does not support CGI. If CGI is needed, one would consider to use an alternative server like e.g. jetforce:

https://github.com/michael-lazar/jetforce

For now, I like the simplicity of agate and static Gemini sites. But in the future I might consider playing around with CGI. But before this, I try to familiarize with the Gemini protocol and the Gemini space.

((( CC-BY 4.0 Jan Grosser )))