1# 🐟 Flounder
 2
 3A lightweight platform 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`mkdir files`
17`go run . serve`
18
19Add the following to `/etc/hosts` (include any other users you want to create):
20
21```
22127.0.0.1 flounder.local admin.flounder.local proxy.flounder.local
23```
24
25Then open `flounder.local:8165` in your browser. The default login/password is admin/admin
26
27## TLS Certs and Reverse Proxy
28
29Gemini TLS certs are handled for you. For HTTP, when deploying your site, you'll need a reverse proxy that does the following for you:
30
311. Cert for yourdomain.whatever
321. Wildcard cert for \*.yourdomain.whatever
332. On Demand cert for custom user domains
34
35If 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.
36
37However, 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. 
38
39For information on using certbot to manage wildcard certs, see this guide: https://letsencrypt.org/docs/challenge-types/#dns-01-challenge
40
41An example simple Caddyfile using on-demand certs is available in Caddyfile.example
42
43If 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.
44
45## Administration
46
47Flounder is designed to be small, easy to host, and easy to administer. Signups require manual admin approval.
48
49## Development
50
51Open a PR, or use one of the mailing lists on https://github.com/alexwennerberg