gophernicus/INSTALL.md

Compiling and installing Gophernicus

Gophernicus requires a C compiler but no extra libraries aside from standard LIBC ones. Care has been taken to use only standard POSIX syscalls so that it should work pretty much on any *nix system.

To compile and install run:

$ git clone https://github.com/gophernicus/gophernicus.git
$ cd gophernicus
$ make
$ sudo make install

after having set the correct public hostname in the gophernicus.env file. If this is wrong, selectors ("gopher links") won't work!

On *nix systems, hostname might give you an idea, but please note this might be completely wrong, especially on your personal machine at home or on some cheap virtual server. If you know you have a fixed numerical IP, you can also directly use that. For testing, just keep the default value of localhost which will result in selectors working only when you're connecting locally.

That's it - Gophernicus should now be installed, preconfigured and running under gopher:///. And more often than not, It Just Works(tm).

By default Gophernicus serves gopher documents from /var/gopher although that can be changed by using the -r <root> parameter. To enable virtual hosting create hostname directories under the gopher root and make sure you have at least the primary hostname (the one set with -h <hostname>) directory available (mkdir /var/gopher/$HOSTNAME).

Dependencies

These were obtained from a base docker installation, what we (will) be using on Travis.

Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, Debian Sid, Buster, Stretch, Jessie

• build-essential
• git
• libwrap0-dev for tcp

Centos 6, 7

• the group 'Development Tools'. less is probably required, but I know this works and couldn't be bothered to find out what was actually required.

Fedora 29, 30, rawhide

• the group 'Development Tools'. less is probably required, but I know this works and couldn't be bothered to find out what was actually required.
• net-tools

OpenSuse Leap, Tumbleweed

• the pattern devel_C_C++
• the pattern devel_basis
• git

archlinux

• base-devel
• git

Gentoo

• git

Alpine Linux

• alpine-sdk. once again, less is probably required.. blah blah.

Other installation targets

Suppose your server runs systemd, but you'd rather have Gophernicus started with inetd or xinetd. To do that, do make install-inetd or make install-xinetd. Likewise use make uninstall-inetd or make uninstall-xinetd to uninstall Gophernicus.

Compiling with TCP wrappers

Gophernicus uses no extra libraries... well... except libwrap (TCP wrappers) if it is installed with headers in default Unix directories at the time of compiling. If you have the headers installed and don't want wrapper support, run 'make generic' instead of just 'make', and if you have wrappers installed in non-standard place and want to force compile with wrappers just run 'make withwrap'.

For configuring IP access lists with TCP wrappers, take a look at the files /etc/hosts.allow and /etc/hosts.deny (because the manual pages suck). Use the daemon name "gophernicus" to make your access lists.

Running with traditional inetd superserver

If you want to run Gophernicus under the traditional Unix inetd, the below line should be added to your /etc/inetd.conf and the inetd process restarted.

gopher  stream  tcp  nowait  nobody  /usr/sbin/gophernicus  gophernicus -h <hostname>

The Makefile will automatically do this for you and remove it when uninstalling.

Compiling on Debian Linux (and Ubuntu)

The above commands work on Debian just fine, but if you prefer having everything installed as packages run make deb instead of plain make. If all the dependencies were in place you'll end up with an offical-looking deb package in the parent directory (don't ask - that's just how it works). And instead of sudo make install you should just install the deb with dpkg -i ../gophernicus_*.deb after which It Should Just Work(tm).

If you need TCP wrappers support on Debian/Ubuntu, please install libwrap0-dev before compiling.

Cross-compiling

Cross-compiling to a different target architecture can be done by defining HOSTCC and CC to be different compilers. HOSTCC must point to a local arch compiler, and CC to the target arch one.

$ make HOSTCC=gcc CC=target-arch-gcc

Shared memory issues

Gophernicus uses SYSV shared memory for session tracking and statistics. It creates the shared memory block using mode 600 and a predefined key which means that a shared memory block created with one user cannot be used by another user. Simply said, running gophernicus under various different user accounts may create a situation where the memory block is locked to the wrong user.

If that happens you can simply delete the memory block and let Gophernicus recreate it - no harm done:

$ sudo make clean-shm

Porting to different platforms

If you need to port Gophernicus to a new platform, please take a look at gophernicus.h which has a bunch of #define HAVE_... Fiddling with those usually makes it possible to compile a working server. If you succeed in compiling Gophernicus to a new platform please send the patches to so we can include them into the next release -- or even better, commit them to your fork on Github and make a pull request!

Supported Platforms

Platform	Versions
Ubuntu	18.04, 16.04
Debian	Sid, Buster, Stretch, Jessie
Centos	7, 6
Fedora	29, 30, Rawhide
Opensuse	Leap, Tumbleweed
Arch Linux	up to date
Gentoo	up to date
Alpine Linux	Edge, 3.9
FreeBSD	12.0