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A lame frontend for a gopher server on FreeBSD 12, a quick & dirty howto
January 24th, 2019
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Here's a quick and dirty howto guide on how to deplay a very basic, but
functional, web frontend to a locally hosted gopher server on FreeBSD 12.
This is an add-on to last phlog I posted, "Gophernicus on FreeBSD12 quick
/dirty HOWTO".  As last time, I used VirtualBox, bridged networking,
and accessed the gopher server + web frontend via LAN (ipv4). Everything
was done as root, but gopherfilter and lighttpd run unprivileged.

First let us pull in a cool webserver and some dependencies:
#pkg install lighttpd curl lynx p5-HTML-Parser tidyp unix2dos

Now lets set it to automatically start on boot
You can do this by editing /etc/rc.conf with your favourite text editor,
add this line to the bottom:
lighttpd_enable="YES""

Our gopher gateway is basically a CGI script, so lets go enable CGI now..
Take a text editor to /usr/local/etc/lighttpd/modules.conf and
remove the comment (#) from the mod_cgi line, it should read:
include "conf.d/cgi.conf"
Also remove the comment from the "mod_alias", line too, that module is
required to redirect suspected gopher URLs to the CGI.

Now that CGI and mod_alias have been enabled, we will tell lighttpd
which URLs belong to the gopher gateway script, to do this we will
replace the /usr/local/etc/lighttpd/conf.d/cgi.conf with a prebaked
version which has the most common gophertypes
#cd /usr/local/etc/lighttpd/conf.d
#mv /usr/local/etc/lighttpd/conf.d/cgi.conf cgi.conf.ORIG
#wget http://gopher.zcrayfish.soy/0/phlog/files/cgi.conf
#dos2unix cgi.conf

Our web files will be stored at /usr/local/www/data/, so go there now and
we'll download the CGI script and do some quick and basic setup
#cd /usr/local/www/data
#wget https://gopher.zcrayfish.soy/0/phlog/files/gopher.sh
#dos2unix gopher.sh
#chmod a+x gopher.sh
#ln -s gopher.sh index.sh

Open gopher.sh in your editor and change the fqdn variable to your
hostname.
Open /usr/local/etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf in your editor and go find the
index-file.names section, make sure index.sh is in the list.

Now we have to do a workaround for a lynx bug that ruins gopher often.
Edit /etc/services and add a line for gopherfilter which we will run on
port 7070, tcp:
gopherfilter     7070/tcp

Edit /etc/inetd.conf and add a line for the gopherfilter server which we
will install in /usr/local/bin/gopherfilter.sh:
gopherfilter  stream  tcp  nowait  nobody  /usr/local/bin/gopherfilter.sh

Now we will download and start the gopherfilter, and start the web server
#cd /usr/local/bin
#wget http://gopher.zcrayfish.soy/0/phlog/files/gopherfilter.sh
#dos2unix gopherfilter.sh
#chmod a+x gopherfilter.sh
#service inetd restart
#service lighttpd start

Now point a browser at your new web server IP and hope that it works!

Have fun!
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