fix features list and talk about I18N
4.4 KiB
gmid
dead simple, zero configuration Gemini server
gmid is a simple and minimal Gemini server. It can run without configuration, so it's well suited for local development, but at the same time has a configuration file flexible enough to meet the requirements of most capsules.
It was initially written to serve static files, but can also
optionally execute CGI scripts. It was also written with security in
mind: on Linux, FreeBSD and OpenBSD is sandboxed via seccomp(2)
,
capsicum(4)
and pledge(2)
+unveil(2)
respectively.
gmid can be used from the command line to serve local directories
# serve the directory docs
gmid docs
or you can pass a configuration file and have access to all the features
gmid -c /etc/gmid.conf
Please consult the manpage for more information.
Features
- IRI support (RFC3987)
- punycode support
- dual stack: can serve over both IPv4 and IPv6
- CGI scripts
- (very) low memory footprint
- small codebase, easily hackable
- virtual hosts
- per-location rules
- optional directory listings
- configurable mime types
- sandboxed by default on OpenBSD, Linux and FreeBSD
- chroot support
Drawbacks
- not suited for very busy hosts. If you receive an high number of connection per-second you'd probably want to run multiple gmid instances behind relayd/haproxy or a different server.
Internationalisation (IRIs, UNICODE, punycode, all that stuff)
Even thought the current Gemini specification doesn't mention anything in this regard, I do think these are important things, so I tried to implement them in the most user-friendly way I could think of.
For starters, gmid has full support for IRI (RFC3987 -- Internationalized Resource Identifiers). IRIs are a superset of URI, so there aren't incompatibilities with URI-only clients.
There is full support also for punycode. In theory, the users doesn't even need to know that punycode is a thing. The hostname in the configuration file can (and must be) written with proper UNICODE, gmid will do the rest.
The only missing piece is UNICODE normalisation. gmid doesn't do that (yet).
Building
gmid depends on a POSIX libc, OpenSSL/LibreSSL and libtls (provided either by LibreSSL or libretls). At build time, flex and yacc (or GNU bison) are also needed.
The build is as simple as
make
If the configure scripts fails to pick up something, please open an issue or notify me via email.
To install execute:
make install
If you have trouble installing LibreSSL or libretls, as they aren't
available as package on various Linux distribution, you can use Docker
to build a gmid
image with:
docker build -t gmid .
and then run it with something along the lines of
docker run --rm -it -p 1965:1965 \
-v /path/to/gmid.conf:...:ro \
-v /path/to/docs:/var/gemini \
gmid -c .../gmid.conf
ellipses for brevity.
Local libretls
This is NOT recommended, please try to port LibreSSL/LibreTLS to your distribution of choice or use docker instead.
However, it's possible to link gmid
to locally-installed libtls
quite easily. (It's how I test gmid on Fedora, for instance)
Let's say you have compiled and installed libretls in $LIBRETLS
,
then you can build gmid
with
./configure CFLAGS="-I$LIBRETLS/include" \
LDFLAGS="$LIBRETLS/lib/libtls.a -lssl -lcrypto -lpthread"
make
Testing
Execute
make regress
to start the suite. Keep in mind that the suite will create files
inside the regress
directory and bind the 10965 port.
Architecture/Security considerations
gmid is composed by two processes: a listener and an executor. The listener process is the only one that needs internet access and is sandboxed. When a CGI script needs to be executed, the executor (outside of the sandbox) sets up a pipe and gives one end to the listener, while the other is bound to the CGI script standard output. This way, is still possible to execute CGI scripts without restrictions even in the presence of a sandbox.
On OpenBSD, the listener process runs with the stdio recvfd rpath inet
pledges, the executor has stdio sendfd proc exec
as pledges;
both have unveiled only the served directories.
On FreeBSD, the executor process is sandboxed with capsicum(4)
.
On Linux, a seccomp(2)
filter is installed to allow only certain
syscalls, see sandbox.c for more information on the BPF
program.
In any case, you are invited to run gmid inside some sort of container/jail/chroot.