🐟 Flounder

A lightweight platform to help users build simple Gemini sites over http(s) and serve those sites over http(s) and Gemini

Flounder is in ALPHA -- development and features are changing frequently, especially as the Gemini spec and ecosystem remains relatively unstable.

See the flagship instance at https://flounder.online

Building and running locally Requirements:

• go >= 1.15
• sqlite dev libraries

To run locally, copy example-config.toml to flounder.toml, then run:

mkdir files go run . serve

Add the following to /etc/hosts (include any other users you want to create):

127.0.0.1 flounder.local admin.flounder.local proxy.flounder.local

Then open flounder.local:8165 in your browser. The default login/password is admin/admin

TLS Certs and Reverse Proxy

Gemini TLS certs are handled for you. For HTTP, when deploying your site, you'll need a reverse proxy that does the following for you:

1. Cert for yourdomain.whatever
2. Wildcard cert for *.yourdomain.whatever
3. On Demand cert for custom user domains

If you have a very small deployment of say, <100 users, for example, you can use on demand certificates for all domains, and you can skip step 2.

However, for a larger deployment, you'll have to set up a wildcard cert. Wildcard certs are a bit of a pain and difficult to do automatically, depending on your DNS provider. For information on doing this via Caddy, you can follow this guide: https://caddy.community/t/how-to-use-dns-provider-modules-in-caddy-2/8148.

For information on using certbot to manage wildcard certs, see this guide: https://letsencrypt.org/docs/challenge-types/#dns-01-challenge

An example simple Caddyfile using on-demand certs is available in Caddyfile.example

If you want to host using a server other than Caddy, there's no reason you can't, but it may be more cumbersome to setup the http certs.

Administration

Flounder is designed to be small, easy to host, and easy to administer. Signups require manual admin approval.

Development

Use git-send-email https://git-scm.com/docs/git-send-email to send a patch to my mailing list:

https://lists.flounder.online/patches/

Note that this code base is pretty bad. Don't worry about it.

Donate

If you'd like to support Flounder development, consider subscribing to my Patreon:

https://www.patreon.com/alexwennerberg