awesome-gemini VS agate

> If you bothered writing a spec, it might as well be unambiguous, no?

Sure, people want unambiguous specs. However there is a list of literally dozens of working clients, servers, and libraries that were implemented based on the Gemini spec as is. Perhaps Daniels concerns are, in practice, not as important?

https://github.com/kr1sp1n/awesome-gemini#clients

I would also point out the hell that is the HTTP/1.0 and HTTP/1.1 specs, and that it took ~15 years for the HTTPbis group to remove all the contrary and ambiguous parts of it.

> His point is also to criticize the technical choices but that's fair game too.

Sure, but many of his criticizes are false. Full Stop. (servers and clients DO support TLS resumption. Proxying does work and there are multiple working examples, client's do server certificate validation)

Or don't make sense ("Gemini closes a TCP connection? HTTP figured out keeps-alives in 1996! This is bad design." HTTP has different access patterns. If Gemini had those access patterns it would be bad design. It doesn't)

There is a few gemini links on awsome-genini list.

I haven't tried them out, but usualy, awsome-* lists are good starting points.

https://github.com/kr1sp1n/awesome-gemini#services

oh I really like the concepts behind the Gemini protocol (https://github.com/kr1sp1n/awesome-gemini). Good to see a name drop here.

Firefox doesn't support opening Gemini links by default, but a range of clients capable of this exist, and, possibly, an addon as well. You would provide a certificate file to it as part of the configuration.

=> https://github.com/kr1sp1n/awesome-gemini * Repology has packages by operating system

You can also see if there is already built software on the awesome-gemini repository.

This tutorial will focus on using the simple Agate software to host your own Gemini capsule. There is a plethora of software to host your content, but I have found Agate to be simple and sufficient for my purposes. A collection of all things Gemini can be found here, which includes a list of server software. Let's get started.

For anyone looking for a fast way to dive into the "Gemini Space", I recommend you check out this list of resources (clients and whatnot): https://github.com/kr1sp1n/awesome-gemini.

Now, all you have to do left is to execute docker-compose up -d to start your server. After booting it up, navigate to your domain using a Gemini browser and you should see a nice page saying "Hello world!".

I tried using agate, and got it running on my machine, but I couldn't connect to it through my client. Since I want to use an HTTP proxy, I gave up on that and tried to install twins, but I couldn't wrap my head around how to write the configuration file, the docs are pretty unclear.

After learning about the protocol and playing around with Amfora and Lagrange on Linux I stared down the path of looking into servers to host my own capsule. I've tried MollyBrown and Agate. However, of the two MollyBrown was much simpler to setup. I have a working Docker configuration for Agate too, but in trying to use my own generated certificate I've not gotten it to work. Agate expects certificates to be in a DER format and converting my personally generated key & cert from PEM to DER format doesn't work. When I spin up agate it only works when I have agate auto generate a new certificate when starting, but this is not ideal for docker since it's expected for containers to be disposable. My other reason for going with MollyBrown is because of the support for client certificate authentication. So far as I can tell, either agate doesn't allow for client certs or I'm just not at the point where I understand agate enough to know how to configure them.

This tutorial will focus on using the simple Agate software to host your own Gemini capsule. There is a plethora of software to host your content, but I have found Agate to be simple and sufficient for my purposes. A collection of all things Gemini can be found here, which includes a list of server software. Let's get started.

Oh, hi! Original author of Agate here.

The code in Agate is a bit weird, because it started as a 100-line toy server I wrote as a weekend experiment. A lot of the early code was optimized for conciseness rather than maintainability. It also had various micro-optimizations that were probably totally unnecessary, just because my idea of fun involves minimizing allocations and copying everywhere.

As other people started actually using the code, and submitting feature requests and patches, I mostly gave up on minimalism as a goal, so the newer code is more focused on maintainability, but it's mixed together with the old code.

My favorite thing about this project is that, as the community grew beyond my own motivation to manage it, the most active contributor @Johann150 stepped up to become the lead maintainer [1], and has done a great job!

[1]: https://github.com/mbrubeck/agate/issues/6