init gemlog

posted: 2025-10-05

Hello Gemspace. If you are reading this, that means means a lot of things have come together. I'm writing to you from my new command line tool, gemlog-cli. This tool saves the posts to couchdb. From there my gemini capsule reads them and serves this page.

Basic arch:

                         ┌────────────────┐           ┌─────────┐
        ┌────────────────► gemini-capsule ┼───────────►frontend │
        │                └────────────────┘           └─────────┘
┌───────────┐                                                    
│  couchdb  │                                                    
└────────▲──┘                                                    
         │                                                       
         │                                                       
         │                                                       
         │                                                       
         └─────┬──────────────┐                                  
               │ gemlog-cli   │                                  
               └──────────────┘                                  

Code:

Still working on a way to view source code from my Forgejo git server nativly on my gemini capsule. For now the link is to clearweb.

Questions

Why cli app?

I've always had a soft spot for the terminal. As gemini is focused on text-based context staying on the terminal feels right.

Why couchdb

Yes I'm already hosting several databases on my homelab. In this case I wanted a document based nosql db. Something simple and quick to setup, similar to dynamodb but self-hostable. Couchdb fits that bill well.

The only issues I have is it is a bit cumbersom to create users and databases.

I created this script to make creating users easier. Runs like `./create_user.sh test-man`. If the users db is not already created it does that as well. If you use it remember to update the host and port.

#!/bin/bash

set -e
COUCH_DB_PW=$(jq -r .PW "$(dirname "$0")/env.json")
USER=$1
PW=$(openssl rand -base64 20)
if [ -z "$COUCH_DB_PW" ] || [ -z "$USER" ]; then
  echo "Usage: $0  "
  exit 1
fi

curl -X PUT "http://admin:${COUCH_DB_PW}@host:port/_users"

curl -X PUT "http://admin:${COUCH_DB_PW}@host:port/_users/org.couchdb.user:${USER}" \
     -H "Accept: application/json" \
     -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
     -d "{\"name\": \"${USER}\", \"password\": \"${PW}\", \"roles\": [], \"type\": \"user\"}"

echo "User ${USER} created successfully\n"
echo "Password: ${PW} write it down as it can't be retrieved later\n"

To create a db run the following using the admin creds:

$ curl -X PUT http://admin:xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx@host:port/gemlog
$ curl -X PUT http://admin:xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx@host:port/gemlog/_security \
     -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
     -d '{"admins": { "names": [], "roles": [] }, "members": { "names": ["gemlog-cli"], "roles": [] } }'

Boom full couchdb tutorial!

Why GoLang?

In the last weeks I've been really taken by the programming language. Quite fun to build web apps with.

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