Running a Gemini server on a first-gen Raspberry Pi

Here records the trials and tribulations of a lost weekend.

Most of these steps presumably work equally well on any device, minus the build of the server software.

Setup instructions

1. Download Adrian Hesketh's server software.

• For the first gen raspberry pi you want the "armv6" build

2. Certificate Generation

• Run the following command to generate a key

openssl ecparam -genkey -name secp384r1 -out server.key

• Run this, making sure to specify the domain of the server for the hostname when requsted

openssl req -new -x509 -sha256 -key server.key -out server.crt -days 3650

3. Create a hello world Gemini file, for testing purposes

mkdir content
echo "# Hello, World!" > content/index.gmi

4. Run the server, and make sure it all works

• Be sure to change the domain to yours with this one
• Once its running use your gemini client of choice to check it all works

gemini serve --domain=example.com --certFile=server.crt --keyFile=server.key --path=content

5. Create a script to simplify running

• Just cd to where the server program is and run the command as it appears in step 4, calling the script "run-server.sh"

6. Tell cron to run it at startup

Run

crontab -e

And append the following

@reboot bash run-server.sh

And that's it, you're done.

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Last Updated: 2020-11-29