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My trip into gemini scripts land

After discovering gemini, I installed quite quickly a capsule - after all I have been using markdown for years, so it was a no-brainer.

I had content from my website, so there again, no real challenge.

Creating my own CGI was a bit more fun.

First of all, it is not very well documented.

I read all the specs I could find, but to no avail.

I looked at the source code of various pages, but there again, no big illumination.

I installed a server (https://github.com/a-h/gemini/releases) on a raspberry3 on my local network to be able to fiddle, but it didn't help.

Then I discovered a page:

wikdict

and I contacted the author (Karl), asking for help.

Karl was very nice and helpful and triggered my first "aha!" moment.

I realized (and so did he) that the reason my setup wasn't working was probably very simply because my server did not support CGIs.

I read the documentation he wrote on his setup (https://www.karl.berlin/gemini-blog.html) and decided to use the same server: gmnisrv (https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/gmnisrv/).

Compiling was straightforward - I just needed to install libssl-dev which wasn't on the raspberry.

My research also led me to another page, also very useful:

https://noulin.net/blog/gemini/2021/02/14/about-gemini-markup-and-gmnisrv.html

Installing the gmnisrv

Thanks to Karl's page and the one quoted above, install was quite simple.

I just had to modify the starting scripts of the raspberry to point to the new server, tested with amfora - good to go.

my config file:

# Space-separated list of hosts
listen=0.0.0.0:1965 [::]:1965

[:tls]
# Path to store certificates on disk
store=/usr/local/gem/certs

# Optional details for new certificates
organization=gmnisrv user

[localhost]
root=/usr/local/gem/files

[localhost:/cgi]
root=/usr/local/gem/files
cgi=on

[raspi31]
root=/usr/local/gem/files

[raspi31:/cgi]
root=/usr/local/gem/files
cgi=on

It is of course this last section with "cgi" which is the key.

CGI script must be in /usr/local/gem/files/cgi.

Writing a script

From the pages and doc read (and Karl's python script used for wikdict, available in his git repository), I knew I would have 4 system variables, of which the most used was $QUERY_STRING.

The 4 variables are:

$QUERY_STRING
$PATH_INFO
$SERVER_NAME
$REMOTE_USER

The gmi page

# Page Test du script

=> cgi/test.sh  Test here

The page (jpg)

The script itself

if [ $QUERY_STRING"X" = "X" ] ; then
  echo "10 Enter something \r"
else
  echo "20 text/gemini\r"
  echo " "
  echo "l'argument passé est $QUERY_STRING"
  echo "PATH_INFO    = " $PATH_INFO
  echo "QUERY_STRING = " $QUERY_STRING
  echo "SERVER_NAME  = " $SERVER_NAME
  echo "REMOTE_USER  = " $REMOTE_USER
  echo " "
  echo " "
  echo " "
  echo " "
  echo "=> ../test.gmi Back"
  echo " "
  echo " "
  echo " "
  echo " "
fi

And yes, there is no first line calling the bash shell. For some reason when I put it, it doesn't work, whereas Karl's scripts in python do call it. Go figure.

Results and remarks

The dialog box (jpg)

The dialog box (2) (jpg)

The result (jpg)

We can see that $QUERY_STRING contains what was entered in the dialog box.

$SERVER_NAME contains the name of the server.

However the two other variables remain empty, so either I misunderstood the specs, or this server doesn't do it properly.

It is not very important, since with that result, we can already write whatever script we want.

(tbc)