September

September is a simple and efficient Gemini-to-HTTP proxy written in Rust.

Gemini requests have a 30-second deadline and a 32 MiB response limit. September accepts self-signed capsule certificates and remembers up to 4,096 host and port pairs while running. A certificate change is rejected until the previous certificate expires. The remembered certificates reset when September restarts.

September remains simple, but packs more features than you could imagine, all configurable via environment variables.

Usage

A production deployment of September can be found at https://fuwn.me, with the root capsule set as gemini://fuwn.me.

You can try proxying any external capsule through the /proxy/ route: https://fuwn.me/proxy/geminiprotocol.net/.

September respects webproxy and wildcard exclusions in destination capsules' robots.txt policies. If a policy cannot be checked, September temporarily declines proxy requests until the check succeeds. A capsule that reports its policy as not found has no proxy exclusions.

Docker

docker run allows you to pass environment variables via the -e flag.

# September with a custom root, listening on port 8080
docker run -d \
  -e ROOT="gemini://fuwn.me" \
  -p 8080:80 \
  fuwn/september:latest

# September with a custom root, port, and external stylesheet, listening on port 80
docker run -d \
  -e ROOT="gemini://fuwn.me" \
  -e PORT="8080" \
  -e CSS_EXTERNAL="https://example.com/style.css" \
  -p 80:8080 \
  fuwn/september:latest

You may start to find this way of passing configuration cumbersome for many options, so a Docker management tool like Portainer or a Docker Compose file might come in handy.

Docker Compose

Docker Compose is a file-configurable Docker utility to make deploying exact container configuration and configuration sets simple. This repository provides a sample Docker Compose file, ./docker-compose.yaml, with some examples configuration values that you can modify to your liking.

After editing the file, you can bring up the composition using docker-compose command.

docker-compose up -d

Executable

While generally discouraged, you can run the September executable by itself and configure it through environment variables.

ROOT="gemini://fuwn.me" PORT="8080" CSS_EXTERNAL="https://example.com/style.css" ./september

If available, September will use the relative directory's .env file for populating its configuration. Here is an example .env file with a few values added.

# .env

ROOT=gemini://fuwn.me
PORT=8080
CSS_EXTERNAL=https://example.com/style.css
HEAD=<script>/* This will appear in the head of the HTML document. */</script>

Configuration

All configuration options with examples can be found in the Configuration.md file. Regardless of deployment method, these options remain present in each case.

Styling

Want to give your website a shiny new look? Try using one of these sources to find a stylish and minimal (!!) CSS theme/ framework!

• dohliam/dropin-minimal-css: Drop-in switcher for previewing minimal CSS frameworks
• dbohdan/classless-css: A list of classless CSS themes/frameworks with screenshots

Origins

The story of September starts with a simple request to add environment variable-configurable options to a pre-existing Gemini proxy.

The proxy in question already had options, just that they were command-line flag configurable options. Apparently, containerising a networked application is not a "valid use-case", and everyone should prefer running raw binaries on their systems and servers. Also, finicky command-line arguments reign superior to the industry standard environment variable, or at least that's what I gather from this author's response to adding a few extra lines of code that I already wrote out for environment variable support.

Anyway, I forked the proxy. Somewhere down the line, I realised that this proxy just isn't cutting it and was poorly designed to begin with, so I threw it in the figurative trash, and wrote September from scratch.

In the end, it all worked out, since September has become the easiest to configure, most feature-packed, quickest to understand (and quickest in general) Gemini-to-HTTP proxy of the bunch.

License

This project is licensed with the GNU General Public License v3.0.