Agate Setup

In the time-honoured tradition of "blog which only has a post about setting it up," here's some notes for my future self to come back to when I've forgotten what I did a few years down the line and I'm migrating it to another server or something.

It's easy enough to run, but I've got it on a server and want it to run at boot. I also want to be able to edit locally and push to the server.

I have a single folder with everything needed called `gemini`. The location isn't important, I've put it in a folder synced by syncthing, but it could just as easily be a git repository.

Let's get it to run locally first. Download the latest agate release, and decompress it into the `gemini` folder. In this folder, run:

mkdir livk.dev
echo '# Hello there' > livk.dev/index.gmi
./agate --content livk.dev --hostname livk.dev

It'll generate self-signed certificates in a new directory called `.certificates` in the current directory.

Here's the systemd unit file.

[Unit]
Description=agate
After=network.target

[Service]
User=liv
Type=simple
ExecStart=/home/liv/gemini/start.sh

[Install]
WantedBy=default.target

In start.sh, we'll include a line to make sure we're in the right directory so it can find our certificates.

#!/bin/sh

cd "$(dirname $0)"
./agate --content livk.dev --hostname livk.dev

We can sync all this to the server using rsync. I've put this in a script so I don't have to type it out. This will copy the whole folder, sync script, systemd unit, gmi files, certificates (if you've already generated them), the whole lot.

#!/bin/sh

cd "$(dirname $0)"
rsync -aP . liv@livk.dev:/home/liv/gemini

Once the files are all on the server, we can log in to the server and set up the service.

sudo ln -s /home/liv/gemini/agate.service /lib/systemd/system
sudo systemctl enable --now agate

And lastly, if you use ufw, don't forget to allow traffic on port 1965.

sudo ufw allow 1965/tcp

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