spacecookie
Haskell gopher server daemon and library.
Features
- implements RFC1436
- optionally supports common protocol extensions:
- supports gophermaps (see below)
- supports systemd socket activation
- provides a library for custom gopher applications (see documentation)
Non-Features
spacecookie intentionally does not support:
- HTTP, Gemini: Multi protocol support is a non-goal for spacecookie.
For HTTP you can proxy
pretty easily, however.
- Search: Gopher supports search transactions, but the spacecookie daemon doesn't offer
the possibility to add a search engine to a gopherspace. It is however
entirely possible to implement an index search server using the
spacecookie library
Installation
Documentation
Configuration
spacecookie is configured via a JSON configuration file.
All available options are documented in
spacecookie.json(5).
This repository also contains an example configuration file in
etc/spacecookie.json.
Running
After you've created your config file just start spacecookie like this:
spacecookie /path/to/spacecookie.json
spacecookie runs as a simple process and doesn't fork or write a PID file.
Therefore any supervisor (systemd, daemontools, ...) can be used to run
it as a daemon.
With systemd
spacecookie supports systemd socket activation. To set it up you'll need
to install spacecookie.service and spacecookie.socket like so:
cp ./etc/spacecookie.{service,socket} /etc/systemd/system/
systemctl daemon-reload
systemctl enable spacecookie.socket
systemctl start spacecookie.socket
systemctl start spacecookie.service # optional, started by the socket automatically if needed
Of course make sure that all the used paths are correct!
How the systemd integration works is explained in
spacecookie(1).
On NixOS
NixOS provides a service module for spacecookie:
services.spacecookie.
Setting up spacecookie is as simple as adding the following line to your configuration.nix:
services.spacecookie.enable = true;
For all available options, refer to the NixOS manual:
Adding Content
spacecookie acts as a simple file server, only excluding files
or directories that start with a dot. It generates gopher menus
automatically, but you can also use custom ones by adding a
gophermap file.
spacecookie checks for .gophermap in every directory it serves and,
if present, uses the menu specified in there.
Such a file looks like this:
You can just start writing text that
will be displayed by the gopher client
without a link to a file. Empty lines are
also possible.
1Menu Entry for a directory full of funny stuff /funny
IFunny Image /funny.jpg
gcat gif /cat.gif
0about me /about.txt
1Floodgap's gopher server / gopher.floodgap.com 70
As you can see, it largely works like the actual gopher menu a server will
send to clients, but allows to omit redundant information and to insert
lines that are purely informational and not associated with a file.
spacecookie.gophermap(5)
explains syntax and semantics in more detail.
The format is compatible with the ones supported by
Bucktooth and
pygopherd.
If you notice any incompatibilities, please open an issue.
Portability
spacecookie is regularly tested on GNU/Linux via CI, but
should also work on other Unix-like operating systems.
Most portability problems arise due to
haskell-socket
which is for example known
not to work on OpenBSD.
Windows support would be possible, but could be tricky as gopher
expects Unix-style directory separators in paths. I personally
don't want to invest time into it, but would accept patches adding
Windows support.
