* Setting up a Gopher Server
Hey folks! In this post I'm going to talk a bit about setting
up my Gopher server and some of the choices I made in doing so.
I hope this is helpful to anyone who stumbles onto this article!
Disclaimer: I'm only a few weeks into learning about Gopher
and the so-called "indie-net", so this article may not
represent the better part of community knowledge, or
"best practices".
* Basics
I'll just rattle these off quickly so that we don't need to spend
too much time on them:
- Server: Ubuntu VPS
- Gopher Server: Motsognir
I won't cover the basics of setting up Motsognir or a basic Gopher
map, as others have already done a great job covering these topics.
Checkout the following WWW links on the topic:
https://gopher.zone/
https://usermanual.wiki/Document/manual.488145643/help
* CGI
Because Gopher is a pretty simple protocol spec, I wanted to
not serve static gopher maps and instead implement everything
as a CGI script. This allows me to be pretty flexible with
the formatting and configuration of the site:
- Can provide a 'plain' non ANSI escape sequence cluttered
version of the site for users who prefer the minimalism
of uniform text/chars
- Can provide interesting tidbits like Last Modification
date of the site and # of uniq visitors
- Silly stuff like intermediate http requests (server side)
to my git server so that I can serve all of my git website
natively in Gopher
The CGI source is actually available to view live, see:
gopher://chate.io/0/foobar.txt
Note: The Gopher server Gophernicus actually offers what I
think is an even cooler way of doing this, with what it calls
moles. Check it out:
https://github.com/gophernicus/gophernicus
I may move over to gophernicus at some point, but for now
I'm enjoying the ease of use of Motsognir.
On that topic, to get all the CGI stuff working correctly
I had to set the following values in the Motsognir config
file. The config file is awesome, and well documented, but
as a newcomer to the protocol it was somewhat confusing
to get it configured right, so I've provided the following:
GopherCgiSupport=1
SubGophermaps=1
DefaultGophermap=
I'd encourage reading the comments for each of these settings
for a clearer understanding of what they're doing, but I leave
this exercise to the reader.
** Footguns and Hangups
A few things I learned trying to always dynamically
generate my gophermap:
- Clients can be finnicky and the protocl spec seems
to be not super well agreed upon by client
implimenters
-- Some clients will not correctly parse info
lines if there is a " " after the i
-- Some clients will seemingly ignore info lines
-- Some clients don't mind if you don't have a "."
char at the EOF, others seem to really care
--- Apparently the "." at EOF is part of the spec,
so it really should be there
-- Some clients will automagically parse out any ANSI
escape sequnces, others will interpret them correctly,
and others will barf them to the screen literally
--- To my knowledge there is nothing in the spec for
handling this, so client implementers can't be blamed
-- Some gopher servers will helpfully auto fill lines in a
map that don't contain <TAB>$host<$TAB>$port. I learned
that motsognir will do this on a statically served map,
but (in hindsight, obviously), not a dynamically
generated one, so make sure you're filling that out
** Helpful Patterns
A few helpful patterns I've employed while writing my CGI
scripts:
- Establish an interface for printing your gopher map. I use
a function that takes 3 args: $gopher_menu_type, $string,
$rest.
The idea being that you call the function this way:
g_print("1","Some Dir","\t$path\t$hostname\t$port");
This function will then, depending on what/if it gets
a CGI query parameter, will either randomly colorize
the output or not, allowing the site to be easily rendered
one way or another.
- As with stuff on WWW, make sure your CGI scripts are
executing quickly, otherwise the client will be left waiting
