Providing an HTTP interface for your gopherhole

⚠️ This post is archived from my phlog in Gopherspace. Please read my post on the Gopher Protocol to get started!

It’s hard to convince people to use the Gopher protocol. So, why not host your own HTTP interface so people can browse your gopherhole via a website?

I’ve talked a lot with sternenseemann over the years because of their Gopher software and this is another good piece of Gopher software written in Haskell by them.

Installation

git clone https://github.com/sternenseemann/gopher-proxy
cd gopher-proxy

Then I removed the override for attoparsec in default.nix and ran nix-build.

Something was messed up with my symbolic link of ~/.nix-profile/ so I also ran this:

nix-env -iA nixpkgs.haskellPackages.gopher-proxy

Then I was able to access gopher-proxy.

nginx config

I wanted to put the proxy behind nginx.

server {
    listen 8765;
    listen 8888 ssl;
    server_name gopher.someodd.zip;

    ssl_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/live/gopher.someodd.zip/cert.pem;
    ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/gopher.someodd.zip/privkey.pem;

    location ^~ /.well-known/acme-challenge/ {
        default_type "text/plain";
        root /var/www/gopher.someodd.zip;
    }

    location / {
        proxy_pass http://localhost:8070;
        proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
        proxy_set_header Host $host;
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
    }

}

I had to comment-out the SSL stuff above before actually doing the HTTP verification with certbot (place files in directory, don’t spin up server):

sudo ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/gopher.someodd.zip.conf /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/
sudo nginx -t
sudo systemctl reload nginx
sudo certbot certonly --webroot-path="/var/www/gopher.someodd.zip" -d 'gopher.someodd.zip'

After that I uncommented the SSL paprts in the nginx config and restarted nginx.

daemonize gopher-proxy

Normally you’d just gopher-proxy --host gopher.someodd.zip --http-port 8070 but in our case we want it as an actual systemd service at /etc/systemd/system/gopher-proxy.service:

[Unit]
Description=Gopher Proxy Service
After=network.target

[Service]
Type=simple
User=baudrillard
ExecStart=/home/baudrillard/.nix-profile/bin/gopher-proxy --host gopher.someodd.zip --http-port 8070
Restart=on-failure

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

then

sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl start gopher-proxy
sudo systemctl enable gopher-proxy
sudo systemctl status gopher-proxy
journalctl -u gopher-proxy
sudo journalctl -xeu gopher-proxy

Test it/conclusion

Now visit your gopherhole via http. I have my proxy at same domain as my gopher subdomain this way people can even accidentally type gopher.someodd.zip and find this proxy! This to me isn’t perfect, but it works.

Original content in gopherspace: gopher://gopher.someodd.zip:70/0/phlog/gopher-http-interface.gopher.txt

someodd