redgem

a gemini server served from a zip file

building

redgem can be built with cargo

cargo build -r

optionally, cross compiling with cross or zigbuild to a musl target and --profile smol can be used to get a more portable (static) and smaller binary. there are also some features that can be toggled, a list of them is in Cargo.toml

turning it into an executable zip is as simple as concatenating a zip of the files you want to serve with the redgem binary, setting it executable, and correcting the zip offsets

cat target/release/redgem src/tests/test.zip > redgem.zip
chmod +x redgem.zip
zip -A redgem.zip

usage

to run it you'll need a tls certificate, a reasonable self-signed one can be created with with openssl

openssl req -x509 -newkey rsa:4096 -days 3650 -noenc \
 -keyout gemini.pem -out gemini.pem -subj "/CN=example.com" \
 -addext "subjectAltName = DNS:example.com" \
 -addext basicConstraints=critical,CA:FALSE

if you do not care about users of older tls libraries, ed25519 instead of rsa:4096 gives a much nicer smaller certificate

then run the zip file while passing it the certificate

./redgem.zip gemini.pem

you can modify the contents later like any other zip file, but try not to do that while redgem is running. the zip library it uses re-opens the zip file when reading for concurrency reasons, and it'll get confused if the contents are different

upgrading

redgem can be removed from a zip file with zip -J. the resulting zip can then be re-concatenated with a new version of redgem like in the build instructions

gempub

while redgem does not have any specific gempub support, the format is simple enough that it can mostly serve the contents of a gempub. this means you can make a gemini server gempub polygot!

however, note that redgem lacks encoding detection for gemtext, and just serves everything as UTF-8. this will be incorrect for gempub files that have an encoding other than UTF-8 specified