nytpu
3.4 KiB
comitium quickstart
comitium is meant to be very easy to get up and running, even in a shared hosting environment where you don't have root access. All you need is a Gemini server capable of hosting static pages and a way to run a program in regular intervals, such as cron.
installing
If you can write to /usr/local/ then you can just follow the instructions
including make install on the README. If you only have access to your
home directory, you can instead find the binary and man page in build/ after
running make. You can then copy or symlink comitium to your preferred bin
directory and you can access the man page with man -l build/comitium.1.
Prebuilt binraies are also available, but they are x86-64 only and for a limited number of operating systems, so it is preferable for you to build it yourself, if possible.
getting set up
data directory
Once you have the binary all set up, you need figure out where you want your
data directory to be. If you're serving from ~/public_gemini or something like
that, then just put export COMITIUM_DATA="~/public_gemini" in your shell's rc
file and the files will all be set up there.
If you're serving from /var/gemini or something similar where the directory is
owned by a user other than your main user, then for security purposes it's
preferable to use the default data directory and symlink feeds.gmi and
subscriptions.gmi into your directory. This way you don't have to run
comitium as root, nor do you need to give users inordinate access to other parts
of the system, nor do you need to log into your gemini user every time you want
to add a feed.
adding feeds
Now you need to add your subscriptions. If you don't have an existing list of
feeds, then just go comitium add <url> whenever you find a new one and you'll
be all set (see man comitium for more details on the add command).
You don't need to run comitium refresh after adding a new feed, add
automatically fetches the new feed and updates your .json and .gmi files with
the new entries.
If you do have an existing list of feeds, it's pretty trivial (for most formats
anyways :P) to write a shell script or similar to parse whatever format they're
currently in and run comitium add for each of them.
customizing header
You can customize the header of your feed.gmi. Simply create a file called
header.gmi in your data directory (where your comitium.json, feed.gmi, and
subscriptions.gmi are) and put whatever you want in it. The line linking to
subscriptions.gmi and listing the number of subscriptions will be placed after
the contents of header.gmi, separated by one newline.
For example, if header.gmi contains:
# my aggregator
then the final feed.gmi will contain:
# my aggregator
=> subscriptions.gmi Currently aggregating X capsules, gopherholes, and websites.
Generated on ...
refreshing regularly
I just put it in my crontab to refresh on a six hour interval:
0 */6 * * * /usr/local/bin/comitium refresh
If you set the data directory with an environment variable like mentioned earlier, make sure to do something like this, because the environment variable isn't passed to cron:
0 */6 * * * /home/somebody/bin/comitium refresh -d /home/somebody/public_gemini
And there you go! You're all set up, now just open up your favorite Gemini
browser, navigate to feeds.gmi, and get to surfin'!