Opal

Opal is a Gemini server written in Rust. It is meant to serve dynamic content through CGI and does not serve static files. In a way, it is a companion project to the Agate Gemini server which only serves static files. The project's goals are:

• Focus on a small set of features (around CGI) but do them correctly.
• Be nice with old/stupid hardware (TLS 1.2 is OK, be efficient, etc).
• Don't add features (see the roadmap at the end of this file).
• Try to keep resources (binary size, memory, etc) under tight control.

Opal uses the openssl Rust bindings, which work with OpenSSL and LibreSSL, so it should work properly on those platforms. I currently only support Linux systems but if there is interest in other platforms let's do this together!

Opal is licensed as GPLv3.

Installation

Pre-compiled releases

Binary releases for 64-bit Linux systems are available on my Gitea and on Github.

Compiling from sources

Compiling Opal requires Cargo installed with the stable Rust toolchain.

Opal tries to use as few dependencies as possible. Here is the current list along with the motivation:

• chrono: helps to convert ASN.1 times to RFC 3339… yeah sorry about that;
• clap: sturdy CLI library;
• env_logger: simple logging frontend for log;
• log: logging framework;
• openssl: SSL support, relies on your system's TLS libraries;
• percent-encoding: handle percent-encoded strings, not provided by url;
• url: URL parsing, best not to reinvent the wheel here;

Usage

Use opal -h to get a list of options. There is no config file, every setting can be configured from the command line.

• -a, --address <address>: specify the address(es) to listen to.
• -c, --cert <cert>: server certificate path.
• -k, --key <key>: server private key path.
• -r, --root-path <root_path>: path to CGI scripts root.
• -e, --env <key=value>: additional environment variables for CGI scripts; this option can be used multiple times.

You can specify multiple addresses to listen to by using several -a options. Note that if you just want to listen to both IPv4 and IPv6 on any interface, listening only on [::]:1965 should suffice for systems with dual-stack enabled (default on many Linux systems, maybe not BSD).

Systemd

I personally run Opal as a Systemd service. Here is an example unit file:

[Unit]
Description=Opal Gemini server

[Service]
WorkingDirectory=/home/gemini/opal
User=gemini
Group=gemini
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/opal -a "[::]:1966" -c certs/cert.pem -k certs/key.pem -r cgi -e STORAGE_ROOT=storage
Restart=always
RestartSec=1
SyslogIdentifier=opal
# Security options:
NoNewPrivileges=yes
ProtectSystem=full
ProtectHome=tmpfs
BindReadOnlyPaths="/home/gemini/opal"
BindPaths="/home/gemini/opal/storage"

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

• Opal has been installed in /usr/local/bin
• The directory /home/gemini/opal contains the directories certs, cgi and storage, for certificates, the CGI scripts and a storage path.
• The /home directory is not readable, except for /home/gemini/opal which is read-only, except for the storage directory which is writeable.

This is just an example, please do not mindlessly copy and paste it without understanding what the options stand for. It is also possible to use a chrooted environment or the Systemd equivalent option RootDirectory. Your choice!

CGI support

Opal tries to implement RFC 3875 (CGI 1.1) and provides all the required environment variables to processes. It also add a bunch of Gemini specific variables, like a lot of other servers (Gemserv, Gmid, Gmnisrv, …). The environment for the subprocess is cleaned and should only contain those variables.

Presence	Variable	Description
always	GATEWAY_INTERFACE	"CGI/1.1"
always	REMOTE_ADDR	Peer IP address and port
always	REMOTE_HOST	Same as REMOTE_ADDR
always	REQUEST_METHOD	Empty string for compatibility
always	SCRIPT_NAME	Script name part of the URL path
always	SERVER_NAME	Hostname used for SNI
always	SERVER_PORT	Port where the request has been received
always	SERVER_PROTOCOL	"GEMINI"
always	SERVER_SOFTWARE	"opal/version", e.g. "opal/0.1.0"
always	GEMINI_DOCUMENT_ROOT	CGI root
always	GEMINI_SCRIPT_FILENAME	CGI script that matched the URL path
always	GEMINI_URL	Full URL, normalized
always	GEMINI_URL_PATH	URL path, normalized
always	TLS_VERSION	TLS version, e.g. "TLSv1.3"
always	TLS_CIPHER	TLS cipher suite, e.g. "TLS_AES_256_GCM_SHA384"
optional	PATH_INFO	Path passed to the CGI process after the script name
optional	QUERY_STRING	Query string if provided, still URL-encoded
client cert	AUTH_TYPE	"CERTIFICATE" if one is provided
client cert	REMOTE_USER	Subject common name (empty if unavailable)
client cert	TLS_CLIENT_ISSUER	Issuer common name (empty if unavailable)
client cert	TLS_CLIENT_HASH	Digest of the DER reprensetation of the cert
client cert	TLS_CLIENT_NOT_AFTER	Validity end date, RFC 3339 format
client cert	TLS_CLIENT_NOT_BEFORE	Validity start date, RFC 3339 format

Opal does not provide CONTENT_LENGTH, CONTENT_TYPE, REMOTE_IDENT because they do not make much sense in Gemini. PATH_TRANSLATED is also not implemented by pure laziness.

The TLS_CLIENT_HASH is a string that starts with the 7 bytes SHA256: followed by the SHA256 digest of the DER representation of the client certificate, as an uppercase hex-string.

It can be a bit confusing which variable represent what data, especially those related to the URL and the path. Take the following request as example: gemini://localhost/env/sub1/sub2?search=élément. Suppose our CGI root, in /cgi, contains the executable script named env. The variables will be:

GEMINI_DOCUMENT_ROOT=/cgi
GEMINI_SCRIPT_FILENAME=/cgi/env
GEMINI_URL=gemini://localhost/env/sub1/sub2?search=%C3%A9l%C3%A9ment
GEMINI_URL_PATH=/env/sub1/sub2
SCRIPT_NAME=/env
PATH_INFO=/sub1/sub2
QUERY_STRING=search=%C3%A9l%C3%A9ment

Roadmap

Things that might end up in Opal one day:

• Support SCGI; a bit more complex but should save resources on smol hardware.

Things that probably won't be considered:

• Serve static files; so many other servers do that correctly already!
• Any kind of security mechanism that is not properly motivated.
• FastCGI; un-smol…