1# 🐟 Flounder: a portal into the small web 
 2
 3A lightweight server to help users build simple Gemini sites over http(s) and serve those sites over http(s) and Gemini
 4
 5Flounder is in ALPHA -- development and features are changing frequently, especially as the Gemini spec and ecosystem remains relatively unstable.
 6
 7See the flagship instance at https://flounder.online and [gemini://flounder.online](gemini://flounder.online)
 8
 9## Building and running locally
10Requirements:
11* go >= 1.15
12* sqlite dev libraries
13
14To run locally, copy example-config.toml to flounder.toml, then run:
15
16`go run . serve`
17
18Add the following to `/etc/hosts` (include any other users you want to create):
19
20```
21127.0.0.1 flounder.local admin.flounder.local proxy.flounder.local
22```
23
24Then open `flounder.local:8165` in your browser.
25
26## TLS Certs and Reverse Proxy
27
28Gemini TLS certs are handled for you. For HTTP, when deploying your site, you'll need a reverse proxy that does the following for you:
29
301. Cert for yourdomain.whatever
311. Wildcard cert for \*.yourdomain.whatever
322. On Demand cert for custom user domains
33
34If you have a very small deployment of say, <100 users, for example, you can use on demand certificates for all domains, and you can skip step 2.
35
36However, for a larger deployment, you'll have to set up a wildcard cert. Wildcard certs are a bit of a pain and difficult to do automatically, depending on your DNS provider. For information on doing this via Caddy, you can follow this guide: https://caddy.community/t/how-to-use-dns-provider-modules-in-caddy-2/8148. 
37
38For information on using certbot to manage wildcard certs, see this guide: https://letsencrypt.org/docs/challenge-types/#dns-01-challenge
39
40An example simple Caddyfile using on-demand certs is available in Caddyfile.example
41
42If you want to host using a server other than Caddy, there's no reason you can't, but it may be more cumbersome to setup the http certs.
43
44## Administration
45
46Flounder is designed to be small, easy to host, and easy to administer. Signups require manual admin approval.
47
48## Development
49
50Open a PR, or use one of the mailing lists on https://github.com/alexwennerberg