Publishing on gophernicus
Originally published by bitreich.org at gopher://bitreich.org/0/tutorials/publish-gophernicus.txt
Gophernicus is quite fussy about permissions, to minimise the risk of accidentally serving files not intended for public consumptions. Only world accessible content will be served, so chmod files o+r and directories o+rw. This is a common cause of confusion and frustration for beginners.
Gophernicus supports so-called “personal gopherspaces”. If a user “bob” has a directory named “public_gopher” in their home directory, then the file /home/bob/public_gopher/foo/bar/baz.ext will be accessible via the selector ~bob/foo/bar/baz.ext (if permissions allow). The name of the “public_gopher” directory can be changed via the -u option. This is a convenient feature for those who want to host multiple users, although it can of course be emulated with symlinks for other server software.
Automatically generated directory listings list files in alphabetical order. This is less than ideal for phloggers who usually want the most recent entry to appear at the top. The conventional workaround for this seems to be to prefix filenames with some kind of timestamp that sorts nicely alphabetically. YYYYMMDD timestamps obviously work nicely, but a three-character alphanumeric code also sees some use, see e.g. gopher://grex.org:70/0/~tfurrows/phlog_filename.txt.
Automatically generated menus can be overridden by creating a file named “gophermap” in any directory. Menu items are specified with lines of the type:
Xname<TAB>selector<TAB>host<TAB>port
where X is the gopher item type. The host and port may be omitted, in which case they will be set to the same host and port that the server is running on (the server’s idea of its own hostname can be forced with the -h option). The selector may also be omitted, in which case it will be set equal to the name. Lines not beginning with a valid item type or with one of Gophernicus’ own non-standard control characters are treated as information lines (type i).
It is important to note that selectors which do not begin with a / will be interpreted as relative links, e.g. a selector of “bar” specified in “foo/gophermap” will point to “foo/bar”. Selectors beginning with / are treated as absolute links. Some other gopher servers with seemingly compatible gophermap syntax (e.g. PyGopherd) treat all selectors as absolute and this can cause headaches when attempting to port gophermaps from one server to another.
Dynamically generated menus are possible by making the “gophermap” file a world-executable script which produces output on stdout of exactly the same format as a static gophermap.
As a lightweight alternative to gophermaps, a file named “gophertag” may be placed in any directory containing a “user friendly” name for that directory to be used in automatically generated listings (e.g. you could placed a gophertag file containing the text “Miscellaneous photographs” in the directory “misc_photos”).