Agate

Simple Gemini server for static files

Agate is a server for the Gemini network protocol, built with the Rust programming language. Agate has very few features, and can only serve static files. It uses async I/O, and should be quite efficient even when running on low-end hardware and serving many concurrent requests.

Since Agate by default uses port 1965, you should be able to run other servers (like e.g. Apache or nginx) on the same device.

Learn more

• Home page: gemini://qwertqwefsday.eu/agate.gmi
• Cargo package
• Source code

Installation and setup

1. Download and unpack the pre-compiled binary.

   Or, if you have the Rust toolchain installed, run cargo install agate to install agate from crates.io.

   Or download the source code and run cargo build --release inside the source repository, then find the binary at target/release/agate.

You can use the install script in the tools directory for the remaining steps if there is one for your system.
If there is none, please consider contributing one to make it easier for less tech-savvy users!

2. Generate a self-signed TLS certificate and private key. For example, if you have OpenSSL 1.1 installed, you can use a command like the following. (Replace the hostname example.com with the address of your Gemini server.)

openssl req -x509 -newkey rsa:4096 -keyout key.rsa -out cert.pem \
    -days 3650 -nodes -subj "/CN=example.com"

3. Run the server. You can use the following arguments to specify the locations of the content directory, certificate and key files, IP address and port to listen on, host name to expect in request URLs, and default language code(s) to include in the MIME type for for text/gemini files: (Again replace the hostname example.com with the address of your Gemini server.)

agate --content path/to/content/ \
      --key key.rsa \
      --cert cert.pem \
      --addr [::]:1965 \
      --addr 0.0.0.0:1965 \
      --hostname example.com \
      --lang en-US

All of the command-line arguments are optional. Run agate --help to see the default values used when arguments are omitted.

When a client requests the URL gemini://example.com/foo/bar, Agate will respond with the file at path/to/content/foo/bar. If any segment of the requested path starts with a dot, agate will respond with a status code 52, whether the file exists or not. This behaviour can be disabled with --serve-secret or by an entry for the specific file in the .meta configuration file (see Meta-Presets). If there is a directory at that path, Agate will look for a file named index.gmi inside that directory.

Configuration

TLS versions

Agate by default supports TLSv1.2 and TLSv1.3. You can disable support for TLSv1.2 by using the flag --only-tls13 (or its short version -3). This is NOT RECOMMENDED as it may break compatibility with some clients. The Gemini specification requires compatibility with TLSv1.2 "for now" because not all platforms have good support for TLSv1.3 (cf. §4.1 of the specification).

Directory listing

You can enable a basic directory listing for a directory by putting a file called .directory-listing-ok in that directory. This does not have an effect on sub-directories. The directory listing will hide files and directories whose name starts with a dot (e.g. the .directory-listing-ok file itself or also the .meta configuration file).

A file called index.gmi will always take precedence over a directory listing.

Meta-Presets

You can put a file called .meta in any content directory. This file stores some metadata about the adjacent files which Agate will use when serving these files. The .meta file must be UTF-8 encoded. You can also enable a central configuration file with the -C flag (or the long version --central-conf). In this case Agate will always look for the .meta configuration file in the content root directory and will ignore .meta files in other directories.

The .meta file has the following format (*1):

• Empty lines are ignored.
• Everything behind a # on the same line is a comment and will be ignored.
• All other lines must have the form <path>:<metadata>, i.e. start with a file path, followed by a colon and then the metadata.

<path> is a case sensitive file path, which may or may not exist on disk. If leads to a directory, it is ignored. If central configuration file mode is not used, using a path that is not a file in the current directory is undefined behaviour (for example ../index.gmi would be undefined behaviour). You can use Unix style patterns in existing paths. For example content/* will match any file within content, and content/** will additionally match any files in subdirectories of content. However, the * and ** globs on their own will by default not match files or directories that start with a dot because of their special meaning. This behaviour can be disabled with --serve-secret or by explicitly matching files starting with a dot with e.g. content/.* or content/**/.* respectively. For more information on the patterns you can use, please see the documentation of glob::Pattern. Rules can overwrite other rules, so if a file is matched by multiple rules, the last one applies.

<metadata> can take one of four possible forms:

1. empty
   Agate will not send a default language parameter, even if it was specified on the command line.
2. starting with a semicolon followed by MIME parameters
   Agate will append the specified string onto the MIME type, if the file is found.
3. starting with a gemini status code (i.e. a digit 1-6 inclusive followed by another digit) and a space
   Agate will send the metadata whether the file exists or not. The file will not be sent or accessed.
4. a MIME type, may include parameters
   Agate will use this MIME type instead of what it would guess, if the file is found. The default language parameter will not be used, even if it was specified on the command line.

If a line violates the format or looks like case 3, but is incorrect, it might be ignored. You should check your logs. Please know that this configuration file is first read when a file from the respective directory is accessed. So no log messages after startup does not mean the .meta file is okay.

Such a configuration file might look like this:

# This line will be ignored.
**/*.de.gmi: ;lang=de
nl/**/*.gmi: ;lang=nl
index.gmi: ;lang=en-UK
LICENSE: text/plain;charset=UTF-8
gone.gmi: 52 This file is no longer here, sorry.

If this is the .meta file in the content root directory and the -C flag is used, this will result in the following response headers:

• / or /index.gmi -> 20 text/gemini;lang=en-UK
• /LICENSE -> 20 text/plain;charset=UTF-8
• /gone.gmi -> 52 This file is no longer here, sorry.
• any non-hidden file ending in .de.gmi (including in non-hidden subdirectories) -> 20 text/gemini;lang=de
• any non-hidden file in the nl directory ending in .gmi (including in non-hidden subdirectories) -> 20 text/gemini;lang=nl

(*1) In theory the syntax is that of a typical INI-like file and also allows for sections with [section] (the default section is set to mime in the parser), since all other sections are disregarded, this does not make a difference. This also means that you can in theory also use = instead of :. For even more information, you can visit the documentation of configparser.

Logging Verbosity

Agate uses the env_logger crate and allows you to set the logging verbosity by setting the default RUST_LOG environment variable. For more information, please see the documentation of env_logger.

Virtual Hosts

Agate has basic support for virtual hosts. If you specify multiple --hostnames, Agate will look in a directory with the respective hostname within the content root directory. For example if one of the hostnames is example.com, and the content root directory is set to the default ./content, and gemini://example.com/file.gmi is requested, then Agate will look for ./content/example.com/file.gmi. This behaviour is only enabled if multiple --hostnames are specified. Agate does not support different certificates for different hostnames, you will have to use a single certificate for all domains (multi domain certificate).

If you want to serve the same content for multiple domains, you can instead disable the hostname check by not specifying --hostname. In this case Agate will disregard a request's hostname apart from checking that there is one.