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created by innocuousAzureus on 14/09/2023 at 04:58 UTC
5 upvotes, 5 top-level comments (showing 5)
Gemini is simple, yet deploying your own Gemini server is not. Isn't there a one-click way to deploy a Gemini server so you can self-host?
2 upvotes, 0 direct replies
If so, I would love to find out. At this point the only way I know of is with a fair amount of command line usage.
I also know of the Bliz server, which seems relatively simple to set up: gemini://cadence.moe/bliz-documentation/01-setup.gmi
I think the biggest thing holding back a one-click solution is generating the TLS certificates. Unless there's a setup script or something that generates them automatically during installation, it seems like that's always going to be an extra step.
2 upvotes, 0 direct replies
It's not any more complicated than setting up a web server. Much simpler actually.
2 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Not one click but here is a step by step guide tested on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS:
sudo apt install molly-brown
First things first that version of Molly Brown has a bug: if you are on both ipv4 and IPv6, it listens on IPv6 only. So if you want to listen on ipv4 you might want to disable IPv6 on your box for now:
sudo sed -i /etc/default/grub -e 's/quiet splash/quiet splash ipv6.disable=1/' -e 's/LINUX=""/LINUX="ipv6.disable=1"/'
sudo update-grub
Next we need to create directories for the Gemini files and certificates, and we need to create your server certificates, and also create a user for the service because for some reason this isn't yet done by default by the deb scripts:
sudo mkdir -p /etc/molly-brown/certs /var/gemini
sudo chown -R $(whoami) /var/gemini
echo "Hello World from Gemini" > /var/gemini/index.gmi
openssl genrsa 2048 > access.key
openssl req -new -x509 -days 36500 -nodes -sha256 -key access.key -out access.crt
sudo mv access.crt access.key /etc/molly-brown/certs/
sudo useradd molly-brown
You will need to edit the config file in /etc/molly-brown it is just a simple set of directives.
If you want AccessLog to work, you will also need to edit the service file to allow write access to the log directory you set. As the service file could be easily overwritten by package updates, I suggest taking a copy and editing that:
sudo systemctl disable molly-brown@.service
awk '//{print} /ProtectSystem=strict/ {print "ReadWritePaths=/var/log/molly-brown"}' < /lib/systemd/system/molly-brown@.service > gemini.service
sudo mkdir /var/log/molly-brown
sudo chown molly-brown:molly-brown /var/log/molly-brown
sudo systemctl enable $(pwd)/gemini.service
Now you can try pointing a Gemini client at your box and see if you can get the hello world message.
Yes I do agree it would be nice if there were fewer steps :) at least a nice thing about command line is we can write notes like this that you can just follow hopefully...
(I actually keep a "do all the things to set up my box" script in a private Git repo, so if something horrible happens to my box and I have to set it up again from scratch, I can just run that. It also makes it easier to read off what I did later.)
2 upvotes, 1 direct replies
I wonder if gemini could leverage existing hosting tech, such as ssh, or even no server at all to make it much easier to deploy on a local network.
supertxt, for example, makes use of cli commands like cats that are sshla that work local as well as they do remote over ssh using your existing ssh creds and configuration.
Also, it would be great if it servers can generate their own config files with sane defaults, including the encryption keys. This is what the conserv server does, although it's ssh tech instead of tls.
1 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Ideally, setting up a gemini server would be as easy as installing a gemini client.
Gemini's philosophy is to have things as simple as possible. Except setting up your own server, it seems.
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