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gmid

gmid is a full-featured Gemini server written with security in mind. It can serve static files, has optional FastCGI and proxying support, and a rich configuration syntax.

A few helper programs are shipped as part of gmid:

Internationalisation (IRIs, IDN, UNICODE)

Even thought the current Gemini specification doesn't mention anything in this regard, I think it's important to make as easy as possible to use non-ASCII characters in domain names and URL paths.

For starters, gmid has full support for IRIs (RFC3987 — Internationalized Resource Identifiers). IRIs are a superset of URIs that allow UNICODE characters, so there aren't incompatibilities with URI-only clients.

There is full support also for IDNs (Internationalized Domain Names). There's no need to fiddle with punycode, or even know what it is: the hostname in the configuration file can (and must be) in the decoded form (e.g. naïve and not xn--nave-6pa), gmid will do the rest.

The only missing piece is UNICODE normalisation of the IRI path: gmid doesn't do that (yet).

Configuration

gmid has a rich configuration file, heavily inspired by OpenBSD' httpd(8), with every detail carefully documented in the manpage. Here's a minimal example of a config file:

# /etc/gmid.conf
server "example.com" {
	listen on * port 1965
	cert "/path/to/cert.pem"
	key  "/path/to/key.pem"
	root "/var/gemini/example.com"
}

and a slightly more complex one

# /etc/gmid.conf
cert_root = "/path/to/keys"

server "example.com" {
	listen on * port 1965

	alias "foobar.com"

	cert $cert_root "/example.com.crt"
	key  $cert_root "/example.com.pem"
	root "/var/gemini/example.com"

	# lang for text/gemini files
	lang "en"

	# only for locations that matches /files/*
	location "/files/*" {
		# generate directory listings
		auto index on
	}

	location "/repo/*" {
		# change the index file name
		index "README.gmi"
		lang "it"
	}
}

Building

gmid depends on libevent2, LibreSSL or OpenSSL, and yacc or GNU bison.

The build is as simple as

$ ./configure
$ make

If the configure scripts fails to pick up something, please open an issue or notify me via email.

To install execute:

# make install

Testing

Execute

$ make regress

to start the suite. Keep in mind that the regression tests needs to create a few file inside the regress directory and bind the 10965 and 10966 ports.

Contributing

Any form of contribution is welcome, not only patches or bug reports. If you have a sample configuration for some specific use-case, a script or anything that could be useful to others, consider adding it to the contrib directory.

Architecture/Security considerations

gmid has a privsep design, where the operations done by the daemon are split into multiple processes: