Agate

Simple Gemini server for static files

Agate is a server for the Gemini network protocol, built with the Rust programming language. Agate has very few features, and can only serve static files. It uses async I/O, and should be quite efficient even when running on low-end hardware and serving many concurrent requests.

Learn more

• Home page: gemini://gem.limpet.net/agate/
• Cargo package
• Source code

Installation and setup

1. Download and unpack the pre-compiled binary.

   Or, if you have the Rust toolchain installed, run cargo install agate to install agate from crates.io.

   Or download the source code and run cargo build --release inside the source repository, then find the binary at target/release/agate.

2. Generate a self-signed TLS certificate and private key. For example, if you have OpenSSL 1.1 installed, you can use a command like the following. (Replace the hostname with the address of your Gemini server.)

openssl req -x509 -newkey rsa:4096 -keyout key.rsa -out cert.pem \
    -days 3650 -nodes -subj "/CN=example.com"

3. Run the server. You can use the following arguments to specify the locations of the content directory, certificate and key files, IP address and port to listen on, and (optionally) a domain that will be used to validate request URLs:

agate --content path/to/content/ \
      --key key.rsa \
      --cert cert.pem \
      --addr 0.0.0.0:1965 \
      --hostname example.com

All of the command-line arguments are optional. Run agate --help to see the default values used when arguments are omitted.

When a client requests the URL gemini://example.com/foo/bar, Agate will respond with the file at path/to/content/foo/bar. If there is a directory at that path, Agate will look for a file named index.gmi inside that directory.

To enable console logging, set a log level via the AGATE_LOG environment variable. Logging is powered by the env_logger crate:

AGATE_LOG=info agate --content path/to/content/