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In my last post [^1] I've written about me jumping
in the Gemini bandwagon and how I was really excited about it. In the past few
weeks I wrote a Gemini server and a Gemini static site generator, both of them
being currently in use for my gemlog.
This post is a bit of a status update and some cool stuff I've learned while
coding my Gemini server and SSG.
Satellite [^2] is my gemini server. For this I took some
inspirations on Drew DeVault's gmnisrv [^3], the main one is that the sysadmin
should not need to manage TLS certificates. Since the gemini spec recommends
the use of TOFU as a authentication method for TLS, there's no need to have
manual interaction in that regard. That way, we can just point satellite to a
certificate directory in the filesystem and satellite will manage everything
for me.
Turns out that satellite was really easy to make in Go. The only external
library I needed was for parsing the toml configuration file. The rest of it
was excellently provided by the stdlib.
Go provides a very good TLS library, so I was able to code a simple gemini
server in a few minutes.
This is how simple it is to make a valid dummy gemini server in go:
package main
import (
"crypto/tls"
"net"
)
func main() {
// Load certficates
cer, err := tls.LoadX509KeyPair("server.crt", "server.key")
if err != nil {
panic(err)
}
config := &tls.Config{Certificates: []tls.Certificate{cer}}
// Listen on 1965 port
ln, err := tls.Listen("tcp", ":1965", config)
if err != nil {
panic(err)
}
defer ln.Close()
for {
// Start accepting connections
conn, err := ln.Accept()
if err != nil {
continue
}
// Return hello world to every request
go handleConnection(conn)
}
}
func handleConnection(conn net.Conn) {
defer conn.Close()
conn.Write([]byte("20 text/gemini\r\n# Hello World"))
}
Satellite also supports multiple virtual hosts and it's really fast!
I do plan to add regex support for URL routes in the config and a form of CGI
support in the future.
gssg [^4] is my static site generator. I've mainly started
working on this because I like the way Hugo abstracts away the site structure
and I only have to worry about the content of my blog posts.
Although the gemini content format is much, much simpler than HTML, and it's
much easier to maintain manually, I've wanted
something on Gemini to create my index pages and add a little footer on
all of my pages.
And that's pretty much what gssg does, it initializes a gemini site with a
basic default template, in which you can put content on the `posts/` folder,
and it will be automatically linked by date on the index page.
This started as alternative to kiln [^5] and for me
to grok Go templates, and to my amazement, Go templating is really simple and
powerful.
I've only used the `text/template` package for building gemini files, but
there's also a `html/template` which I haven't played around with yet.
gssg was a one-day project, there's a lot of rough edges and it needs a code
cleanup, but it's working nicely for my gemlog.
---
And that's it, I had a lot of fun working on these projects and learned a lot
of Go in the process. However, maybe I should start adding content to my gemini
pages instead of writing software for it.
Until next time!
---
Writing gemini software for fun and games was published on 2020-11-25
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