Bore: Join the Gopher Protocol

Think something like Jekyll (static site builder), but for gopherspace. Comes bundled with a Gopher server (branched from spacecookie) with a search feature.

Example bore project (source code from my gopherhole), try building it with bore and messing around with it.

Made with love and my interest for utilizing lofty Ivory tower things in the real world(tm).

Installing

There are .deb packages in the release section of the Github repository.

If you want you can simply run stack build in the repo.

Features

• Build your phlog into a Jekyll blog with a single command

• Built-in server

  • Configurable
  • Development mode to test changes locally
  • Can watch a directory and update your gopherhole when you make changes
  • Search! People can search your gopherhole~
    • Formally-verified
    • property tested

• Supports Bucktooth shorthand for writing gophermaps/menus+support for .gophermap

• Phlogging features (blogging, but for gopher)

  • Tagging system
  • RSS/Atom feed generation

• Converts Markdown files to a gopherhole

  • Will turn Markdown links into footnote links as to not disrupt flow
  • Can still use gophermap/menu syntax to link to documents in gopherspace

• Templating

  • ASCII-art-like tools

    • Limited Figlet font support
    • Custom container boxes--shove content into ascii art boxes, with a format to specify how to draw them--make your own!
    • Word wrap

  • Parent templates

  • Include other files

  • Frontmatter, like jekyll, with controls for things like what type of file to generate, if the file is a draft, etc.

  • Flow control

  • Based on Mustache

  • templating! {{like this for variables}}, but even figlet font functions and ASCII art container support

Quickstart

After installing Bore, try cloning this demo repo:

git clone https://github.com/someodd/personal-gopherhole

Then try this commands:

bore watchServe --source ./personal-gopherhole --output /tmp/gopherout --dev-mode

Visit the gopherhole at gopher://localhost:7071. Try opening that URL in Lagrange (ssee also: lynx, gopher, or even Dillo. I also made my own client Waffle).

Try messing with/reading the files in personal-gopherhole. When you change something it'll rebuild the gopherhole. Refresh Lagrange/your client to see the changes.

Very opinionated structure

Just know for now to take a look at the example bore project (source code from my gopherhole) and the directory structure. I'll explain this in more detail later, but I've decided to just make the directory structure rather rigid and opinionated (everything has its place, basically).

Make a phlog post

Try making a file like phlog/hello-world.gopher.txt (that file extension, for now, is important).

Try giving it these contents:

---
date: 2025-03-09
title: "XMPP: audio/video call support (prosody)"
tags: [sysadmin, linux, xmpp, prosody]
---

Hello, world!

There's other features, too, for the frontmatter of phlog posts like:

• draft: if this value is true it will hide the post from index
• gophermap if this value is true this phlog post will be made into a gophermap/menu rather than a simple plain text file

Building your phlog to a Jekyll blog

Instead of building your posts to a phlog (gopher) you can also build to a Jekyll blog format.

I use this for my website, built with Jekyll+GitHub Pages, which you can see in action on [https://www.someodd.zip/] -- just take a look at my blog, namely the phlog-mirror section.

Use a command like:

bore jekyll --source /home/tilde/Projects/gopherhole_bore --output /home/tilde/Projects/someodd.github.io/

It assumes _posts in the output directory and phlog/ in the source directory.

There's frontmatter to control how posts are made into Jekyll blog posts:

• skipJekyll: if true do NOT build this post to the Jekyll blog
• jekyll: use this directly as frontmatter in Jekyll.

Example of a post with the jekyll frontmatter:

---
date: 2024-05-17
parent: post.txt
title: Productivity in Window Maker
tags: [windowmaker, debian, linux]
jekyll:
  image:
    path: /assets/screenshot-window-maker.png
    thumbnail: /assets/screenshot-window-maker.png
    caption: My Window Maker setup (screenshot).
---

I use the old school, lightweight [Window Maker](http://www.windowmaker.org/)
[window manager](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Window_manager) on Debian
Unstable.

This will output a file that looks like this:

---
date: 2024-05-17
image:
  caption: My Window Maker setup (screenshot).
  path: /assets/phlog/screenshot-window-maker.png
  thumbnail: /assets/phlog/screenshot-window-maker.png
tags:
- windowmaker
- debian
- linux
title: Productivity in Window Maker
---

I use the old school, lightweight [Window Maker](http://www.windowmaker.org/)
[window manager](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Window_manager) on Debian
Unstable.

Running a server

Join gopherspace!

• Be sure to edit your project's bore.toml
  • If you have permission errors you can comment out the user entry line, also try running on port 7071.
  • Make sure to edit your hostname to be a domain pointing at your server
  • I recommend just leaving listenAddress as :: unless you know what you're doing.

If you installed the .deb package you can use handy commands like:

sudo service bore restart
sudo journalctl -u bore.service

Otherwise you'll need to manually run the server with a command like this:

bore watchServe --source /path/to/your/gopherhole-project --output /path/where/files/output/to

The assets directory doesn't get wiped when the goperhole is rebuilt (in the output directory), so if you want put large files in your output directory's asset/ subdirectory.

Tip: client/server setup I use

Let's make a secure/chroot'd setup for sftp'ing source (and assets) updates using the pre-existing bore user the package installs.

Server setup

Create the required directories:

sudo mkdir -p /var/gopher/.ssh

Then add SSH public key for the bore user in /var/gopher/.ssh/authorized_keys:

ssh-rsa AAAAB3Nza... your_key_here

Then add the following lines to your /etc/ssh/sshd_config:

Match User bore
    ChrootDirectory /var/gopher
    AuthorizedKeysFile /var/gopher/.ssh/authorized_keys
    ForceCommand internal-sftp
    PermitTunnel no
    AllowAgentForwarding no
    AllowTcpForwarding no
    X11Forwarding no

Finalize some permissions:

sudo chown root:root /var/gopher
sudo chmod 755 /var/gopher

sudo chown -R bore:bore /var/gopher/.ssh
sudo chmod 700 /var/gopher/.ssh
sudo chown -R bore:bore /var/gopher/source
sudo chown -R bore:bore /var/gopher/output

Finally restart sudo systemctl restart ssh, although you may also want to sudo service bore restart.

Copying to server (from client)

Install lftp:

sudo apt-get install lftp

Now if you want to copy your source directory (local to remote):

lftp -e "mirror -R /path/to/local_directory /source/; quit" -u bore, sftp://simulacra

... or to ensure old files are deleted (mirror remote/local):

lftp -e "mirror -R --delete ./ /source/; quit" -u bore, sftp://simulacra

Just copy a single file to assets folder:

lftp -e "put -O /output/assets/ 'cool picture.jpg'; quit" -u bore, sftp://simulacra