💾 Archived View for gemini.uxq.ch › running.gmi captured on 2021-12-03 at 12:44:48. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2021-11-30)
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This section describes the way I used to run geminid. Since then I have migrated to a systemd-based setup. Yeah, love it or hate it, it's what's available on my system at the time. You can read the details below.
I have created a new user "gemini", which is used to run the daemon (which doesn't daemonize yet...). Also, I have created the following directories:
My previous configuration for geminid (/usr/local/etc/geminid/geminid.conf) looked like this:
global = { serverroot = "/srv/geminid"; logdir = "/var/log/geminid"; loglocaltime = "yes"; logtimeformat = "[%d/%b/%Y:%H:%M:%S %z]"; port = 1965; }; vhost = ( { name = "gemini.uxq.ch"; docroot = "gemini.uxq.ch"; accesslog = "gemini.uxq.ch_access.log"; errorlog = "gemini.uxq.ch_error.log"; cert = "/usr/local/etc/geminid/certs/gemini.uxq.ch.pem"; key = "/usr/local/etc/geminid/keys/gemini.uxq.ch.pem"; index = "index.gmi"; } );
Furthermore it's missing a proper init script, but since the start of the process is pretty simple, I haven't taken the time to do that. I keep running the server in a screen-session in the context of the "gemini" user. Starting the server is done via
geminid -c /usr/local/etc/geminid/geminid.conf
I've recently switched from a tiny virtual machine to bare metal, mainly because I have several services I want to run and some data which I want to be accessible from everywhere without NATing into my home network. I took the occasion to think about proper service start. Since I'm running OpenSUSE on this machine, it was clear that the solution would involve systemd in some way.
I also wanted to keep things separated, so running the daemon in a chroot seemed reasonable.
I created a user and a corresponding group:
# useradd -d /users/gemini -m -U -s /usr/bin/csh gemini
Then I built the geminid binary and built a directory structure:
# su - gemini $ mkdir -p bin etc/geminid/{keys,certs} lib64 src srv/geminid/gemini.ux{q,w}.ch var/log/geminid $ cd src $ git clone https://github.com/jovoro/geminid.git geminid-code $ cd geminid-code $ make $ mv geminid ~/bin
I used ldd to identify the needed libraries and copied them over to the chroot:
$ cd $ ldd bin/geminid $ cp /usr/lib64/libconfig.so.11 /usr/lib64/libmagic.so.1 /usr/lib64/libssl.so.1.1 /usr/lib64/libcrypto.so.1.1 /lib64/libc.so.6 /lib64/libz.so.1 /lib64/libpthread.so.0 /lib64/libdl.so.2 /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 lib64
After that I copied the content over and moved the configuration file to ~/etc/geminid. The next step was to test running geminid in a chroot environment:
# chroot --userspec=gemini:gemini /users/gemini /bin/geminid -c /etc/geminid/geminid.conf
Which seemd to work, so the final step was to write corresponding instructions for systemd. The resulting unit file looks like this:
[Unit] Description=Geminid, a gemini server written in C After=network.target [Service] Type=simple User=gemini Group=gemini RootDirectory=/users/gemini ExecStart=/bin/geminid -c /etc/geminid/geminid.conf [Install] WantedBy=multi-user.target
Now systemd handles the starting and stopping of a chrooted geminid, which is kind of relaxing. I might get to write some examples for other init systems and put them into the repository, but that has to wait a little longer.
Last updated: 2021-11-12