Bore: Make Gopherholes

Tool for building your own hole in gopherspace (Gopher Protocol).

I made this because I wanted to rebuild my Burrow.

It comes with its own Gopher Protocol server (ripped from spacecookie, but the gopherhole it builds can be used by pretty much any Gopher server.

In use on gopher://gopher.someodd.zip/

Installing

There are packages in the release section of the Github repository

Features

Here are some features, but I recommend checking out example/ for an example gopherhole:

• Moustache templating! {{like this for variables}}, but even figlet font functions and ASCII art container support
• Bundled with a Gopher Protocol server
• FrontMatter support, you can choose if something is to become a gophermap/menu (you can even use the .gophermap standard for writing those!)
• Phlogging (blogging) support, with a generated Atom feed and tag and main indexes
• Search support, search all your .txt files with a file ranking algorithm (search on /search) -- partially formally verified and results get property tested!

Quickstart

Just download the lastest .deb from the releases.

Edit the hostname setting in the /var/gopher/source/bore.toml file to reflect the domain you want it to use (or just any IP address).

sudo service bore restart

Now you should be able to edit/place files in /var/gopher/source and you can visit gopher://whateveryourhostname:7071/1/ in a Gopher Client like Lagrange, lynx, gopher, or even Dillo. I also made my own client Waffle, but I don't recommend that unless you're Haskell-saavy at the moment.

The assets directory doesn't get touched when the goperhole is rebuilt. So it's a good idea to put large files here.

If you have any trouble try:

sudo journalctl -u bore.service

Tip: easily update server

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

Plans to port from Burrow

• Columnation
• Possibly markdown (not sure how useful this actually is )