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Now on Jetforce and CGI Plans

Date: 2020-06-03

State: Done

The Move to Jetforce

I've been using my own homegrown Python script to serve files through stunnel and Xinetd but decided the time had come where I actually wanted to start writing some Gemini CGI stuff. I could pretty easily extend my server to execute scripts and have it return the output, but I felt like:

I wanted my server to be a bit more resilient before I did that. The script was written in Python, and I just had a simple "try/except" loop that would catch all errors and return "50 PERMANENT FAILURE".

I did want to try something a bit more performant than having to spawn a new process on every single request (though that hasn't stopped me from playing around with Gophernicus).

I would need to add a bit of logic around CGI scripts and making sure that the server returned the correct response codes if my CGI script failed (which, if you saw earlier, was a departure from my current janky error handling).

I wanted to add Vhost support to my server. I grabbed a domain name the other day that I intend to host most of my CGI content on, and it would be nice if I could cleanly separate the two domains but still use my potato DigitalOcean Droplet to serve them both.

If I wanted to satisfy the above requirements, I woud need to rewrite my Python server script. I decided that, rather than reinvent the wheel, I may as well use one of the many servers out there that already hold open persistent sockets in an accept loop and can already handle CGI. I settled on Jetforce because I didn't want to install the Go toolchain on my DO Droplet, but did have Python installed. I have no opposition to using Go, and actually enjoy the language quite a bit, so if I were to deploy Molly Brown in the future, I would probably cross-compile it on another machine and just scp the binary onto the DO Droplet.

When I read through the Molly Brown source, I found the same permissions checking code that Gophernicus used. Having fought with permissions with Gophernicus, I wanted something a bit less opinionated, so I settled on Jetforce. I wish Jetforce had Vhost support, and while I could add that, I will probably eventually write a full featured Gemini server in Nim that can take full use of the resources on my potato box and have Vhost, CGI, and Client Cert support.

The Process of Moving

Moving was fairly easy because I haven't written too much yet. I had to:

Create copies of my ".gem" files to ".gmi" files, because Jetforce serves ".gmi"
Hold onto the old ".gem" files in case clients with older versions of the atom.xml or just old bookmarks wanted to access my capsule.
Modify all references in the new ".gmi" files to point to other ".gmi" files and not ".gem" files as the originals had.
Change my musings/atom.xml file to point to the new .gmi files
Delete emacs swap files that were created while authoring these posts. My server script would reject requests requesting emacs swap files, but Jetforce has no such option baked in.

My CGI Plans

Create a Gemini mirror for the NPR Text News Site

NPR Text News

Create a Gemini mirror for the CNN Text News Site in English

https://lite.cnn.com/en

Create a Gemini mirror for some weather from the American NWS
Create a Gemini mirror for the Lobsters site

https://lobste.rs

Because Jetforce does not support Vhosts, I'll just be using a cgi-bin path to serve these. This is good enough for now, and when I'm really craving Vhost support I'll roll my own server.

I realize most of these ideas are fairly America-centric, but of course I am an American. If anyone has ideas for other sites they want mirrored via CGI, feel free to reach out.