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To create a digitalocean droplet you can follow the instructions here:
https://docs.digitalocean.com/products/droplets/how-to/create/
For this I will be using a low-end droplet with Ubuntu 20.04 that I already have configured for running long-term data gathering tasks.
Once you have setup a droplet you can go to the domains section of your digitaocean panel and set up your domain. You will want to make sure it is pointing to the droplet you just created.
For more details about adding domains to digitalocean droplets, see here:
https://docs.digitalocean.com/products/networking/dns/how-to/add-domains/
Once everything is setup we can log into our new droplet. In my case thats:
ssh root@memex
We will add a user account to the droplet to manage our gemini capsule:
adduser gemini
And give it sudo access:
usermod -aG sudo gemini
Then log into the new account:
su - gemini
We can make a directory in our gemini users home directory, and then add a hello-world page so we can test that it's working.
mkdir capsule echo "Hello World" >> index.gmi
To get the capsule up and running we first need to download the agate server. This is an easy to use server that will allow others to access the content in our capsule directory.
To download agate, you need to select the latest release from the github here:
https://github.com/mbrubeck/agate/releases/
The current release is v3.10, so we can download as follows:
cd ~/bin wget https://github.com/mbrubeck/agate/releases/download/v3.1.0/agate.x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu.gz gunzip agate.x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu.gz sudo chmod +x agate.x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu mv agate.x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu.gz /usr/local/bin/agate
Once that's done, we can set up the systemd file to run the server:
sudo nano /etc/systemd/system/gemini.service
And copy in the following config, being sure to change <your-hostname> to whatever domain you have pointed to your droplet:
[Unit] Description=agate After=network.target [Service] User=gemini Type=simple ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/agate --content /home/gemini/capsule --hostname <your-hostname> --lang en-US --certs /home/gemini/.certificates [Install] WantedBy=default.target
To exit nano, use ctrl-x and follow the prompts.
In earlier versions of agate it was necessary to generate and setup keys manually. But now agate will do all of that automatically for us. So we don't have to do anything here :)
The server can be started from the command line with the following:
sudo systemctl start gemini.service sudo systemctl enable gemini.service
The enable command ensures that the server starts when the system is booted.
I'm using elpher (a gemini broswer for emacs), so I just navigate to gemini://0x735.com, and the index page is there.