moved to sourcehut: https://git.sr.ht/~chrs/gmlgcd

gmlgcd is your gemlog companion enabling your visitors to interact with your posts. It accepts FastCGI connections from a gemini server and handles them as comment requests.

Requirements:

• libevent
• libconfuse
• libbsd (on linux)
• meson (build)
• ninja (build)
• fish (test)

$ meson setup builddir --buildtype release

# opional: (systemd)
$ meson configure builddir -Dsystemddir=/etc/systemd/system

$ ninja -C builddir
$ sudo ninja -C builddir install

While I am using this on Linux, I paid attention to make it compatible with and buildable on OpenBSD. Platform specific functionality like landlock(7) is replaced by pledge(2) and unveil(2). Your mileage may vary, I haven't thouroughly tested gmlgcd on that platform, however.

A PKGBUILD on the AUR exists: gmlgcd

Edit /etc/gmlgcd.conf or set a different config file with gmlgcd -c my.conf. An example configuration file is provided under gmlgcd.conf.

Then, redirect a given location / subpath to gmlgcd via fastcgi. For example, with gmid:

server example.tld {
  ...
  location "/add-comment/*" {
    fastcgi socket "/run/gmlgcd/fcgi.sock"
    # or, depending on gmlgcd.conf
    fastcgi socket tcp "127.0.0.1" port 1851
  }
}

Then, in your gemini server webroot, create a directory to store your comments. Say, your gemini webroot is at /srv/gemini/example.tld; For every file that is supposed to receive comments, a writeable file needs to exist in /srv/gemini/example.tld/comments. So, for /srv/gemini/example.tld/{about.gmi,blog/post.gmi}, /srv/gemini/example.tld/comments/{about.gmi,blog/post.gmi} have to exist. You can then serve the comments/ location just like any other location using your gemini server. If the file does not exist, users will receive a warning indicating that comments are not enabled. If the file is not writeable for gmlgcd, users will receive a warning that comments are not allowed.

Users may supply a username by prefixing their username, followed by a colon and a space: username: comment to set their displayed username. Otherwise, a name will be taken from the user certificate. User certificates are required. Also, ratelimiting takes place when too many bad requests have been issued in a too short amound of time.

Non-exhaustive, randomly ordered list of things I still want to do, until I consider this to be complete: (Contributions welcome)

• fully specify comment formatting, using a configuration string
• configuration of quarantine (rate-limiting)
• replace user hashes with emojis (maybe, configurable)
• test compatibility with other gemini servers
• write gmlgcd.conf(5) (and switch to manpage generation via pandoc. yikes!)