content/blog/2021-04-17-gemini-server.org

To read more about Gemini and ways to test out this new protocol without your own server, see my previous post Launching a Gemini Capsule.

This guide assumes you have access to a server accessible to the world through a public IP (internet protocol) address and that you own a domain name used for this Gemini capsule.

We are going to use Agate for this tutorial. This is a basic Gemini server written in Rust. It takes very little time and maintenance to get it running.

First, you will need to install the Rust package for your system. On Ubuntu, use the following commands (remember to use sudo if you are not the root user). The Rust installation will give you options to customize the installation; I used the default installation options.

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y
curl https://sh.rustup.rs -sSf | sh

Remember to configure your shell with the new configuration:

source $HOME/.cargo/env

Before we install agate, make sure you have the gcc package installed:

sudo apt install gcc

Next, you'll need to install the agate executable with Rust's Cargo package maintainer:

cargo install agate

Once Cargo has finished installing all the required packages, create a symbolic link to the executable to your $PATH.

sudo ln -s $HOME/.cargo/bin/agate /usr/local/bin/agate

If you're running Ubuntu or Debian, use the Debian installation script found in Agate's GitHub repository, under the tools/debian folder.

git clone https://github.com/mbrubeck/agate
cd agate/tools/debian
sudo ./install.sh

We have a little more to do, but since this script tries to immediately run the service, it will likely fail with an exit code. Let's add our finishing touches. Edit the following file and replace the hostname with your desired URL (uniform resource locator). You can also change the directory where content will be served.

sudo nano /etc/systemd/system/gemini.service

# Edit these lines to whatever you want - see the next code block for my personal configuration.
WorkingDirectory=/srv/gemini
ExecStart=agate --hostname $(uname -n) --lang en

This is my personal config:

WorkingDirectory=/var/gemini/
ExecStart=agate --hostname gemini.example.com --lang en

Since we've altered the systemd configuration files, we have to reload the daemon. Let's do that, restart our service, and check its status.

sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl restart gemini.service
sudo systemctl status gemini.service

If you're still getting errors, the installation process may not have properly enabled the gemini service. Fix it with the following commands.

sudo systemctl enable gemini.service
sudo systemctl restart gemini.service
sudo systemctl status gemini.service

Great! Our server is now functional and running. The first consideration now is that you need to be able to access port 1965 on the server. If you have a firewall enabled, you'll need to open that port up.

sudo ufw allow 1965
sudo ufw reload

Let's create the Gemini capsule. Note that wherever you set the WorkingDirectory variable to earlier, Agate will expect you to put your Gemini capsule contents in a sub-folder called content. So, I place my files in /var/gmi/content. I'm going to create that folder now and put a file in there.

sudo mkdir /var/gemini/content
sudo nano /var/gemini/content/index.gmi

You can put whatever you want in the index.gmi file, just make sure it's valid Gemtext.

To view the results, you can use a Gemini browser, such as Lagrange or amfora.