Running a Gemini server on a first-gen Raspberry Pi

Here records the trials and tribulations of a lost weekend.

Most of these steps presumably work equally well on any device, minus the build of the server software.

Setup instructions

1. Download Adrian Hesketh's server software.

For the first gen raspberry pi you want the "armv6" build

2. Certificate Generation

Run the following command to generate a key

openssl ecparam -genkey -name secp384r1 -out server.key

Run this, making sure to specify the domain of the server for the hostname when requsted

openssl req -new -x509 -sha256 -key server.key -out server.crt -days 3650

3. Create a hello world Gemini file, for testing purposes

mkdir content
echo "# Hello, World!" > content/index.gmi

4. Run the server, and make sure it all works

Be sure to change the domain to yours with this one

Once its running use your gemini client of choice to check it all works

gemini serve --domain=example.com --certFile=server.crt --keyFile=server.key --path=content

5. Create a script to simplify running

Just cd to where the server program is and run the command as it appears in step 4, calling the script "run-server.sh"

6. Tell cron to run it at startup

Run

crontab -e

And append the following

@reboot bash run-server.sh

And that's it, you're done.

Last Updated: 2020-11-29

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