First venture into gemini

I randomly noticed a hacker news post on the Gemini Protocol, and was intrigued. I miss the good old web, before cookies and popups and ever present advertising overtook everything. And before everything got completely centralized on a handfull of walled garden services. So, let's try again. Back to basics.

I set up a podman container to host my gemini service:

$ cat <<'EOF' > Dockerfile
#
# Dockerfile for gmnisrv
#

FROM alpine
MAINTAINER Jan-Frode Myklebust <janfrode@tanso.net>

RUN apk add --no-cache git gcc openssl openssl-dev make libc-dev scdoc
RUN git clone https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/gmnisrv
RUN cd gmnisrv && ./configure && make && make install
RUN mkdir -p /usr/local/etc
RUN mkdir -p /srv/gemini/etc
RUN cp /usr/local/share/gmnisrv/gmnisrv.ini /srv/gemini/etc/gmnisrv.ini

EXPOSE 1965

CMD ["/usr/local/bin/gmnisrv", "-C",  "/srv/gemini/etc/gmnisrv.ini"]
EOF

$ podman build --pull-always -t gmnisrv .

Then populated /srv/gemini with a default config file in /srv/gemini/etc/gmnisrv.ini, TLS key and cert from Let's encrypt in the same folder, and a /srv/gemini/files folder to hold my content. Most importantly I put a index.gmi into the files/, with a nice ascii art header of my name. Then I started the container using the following:

$ podman run -v /srv/gemini:/srv/gemini:Z -p 1965:1965/tcp -it gmnisrv

Once I'm happy that it's working, I start it as a systemctl service instead:

$ cat <<'EOF' > /etc/systemd/system/gmnisrv.service
[Unit]
Description=Gemini container

[Service]
Restart=always
ExecStart=/usr/bin/podman start -a gmnisrv
ExecStop=/usr/bin/podman stop -t 2 gmnisrv

[Install]
WantedBy=local.target

EOF

$ podman run  -v /srv/gemini:/srv/gemini:Z -p 1965:1965/tcp --name gmnisrv -d gmnisrv
$ podman kill gmnisrv
$ systemctl enable gmnisrv.service
$ systemctl start gmnisrv
$ systemctl status gmnisrv

And some content:

$ cat <<'EOF' > /srv/gemini/files/index.gmi
     __               _____                  .___
    |__|____    _____/ ____\______  ____   __| _/____
    |  \__  \  /    \   __\\_  __ \/  _ \ / __ |/ __ \
    |  |/ __ \|   |  \  |   |  | \(  <_> ) /_/ \  ___/
/\__|  (____  /___|  /__|   |__|   \____/\____ |\___  >
\______|    \/     \/                         \/    \/
# Jan-Frode's flight log


 => /diary/2020-10-25.gmi 2020-10-24 My first venture into gemini
EOF

$ vi /srv/gemini/files/diary/2020-10-25.gmi
write this text... :-)

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