GoFish Gopher Server

GoFish Gopher / Web Server

Every Open Source project must have a web page. This is GoFish's page. It's all we could afford.

What is it?

GoFish is a gopher server. The gopher protocol predates the world wide web. They say that "inside every big program is a little program trying to get out". Well gopher is the "little program" inside the web. It is very good for providing content, it is not as good at providing flash.

Most web browsers, such as Netscape and Internet Explorer, support gopher.

GoFish is a web server. GoFish can function as a web server for static pages.

GoFish is a gopher to http gateway. This allows the gopher impaired access to gopherspace. To see it in action, rather than choosing gopher://seanm.ca/, select http://seanm.ca:70/. Notice the port number on the http request. 70 is the default port number for gopher.

Obligatory screenshots.

Why is this not in gopherspace?

Q: "Okay smarty, if gopherspace is so great, why is this a web page?"

A: Sighhhh..... Many more people use the web than gopher. And while gopher had the first crawlers and search engines, today most of the search engines are on the web. To get this out to the public, it needs a web presence.

What systems does it support?

Any Unix like system should work. This includes Linux, Solaris, and Mac OS X. It should even compile under cygwin.

Where can I get it?

I am hosting GoFish on SourceForge. You can download GoFish via the project page below.

GoFish as a Web Server

As of the 0.17 release, GoFish can be used as a simple web server for static pages. GoFish was able to act as a gopher to http gateway, but has been expanded to support more of the features of a web server.

Note that currently, for the web server to work correctly you *must* follow the following rules:

No one character directories or file names.
Default filename is index.html, not index.htm.
Static pages only. No support for CGI, PHP, asp, etc.

Running Both a gopher and web server

You need two instances of GoFish to support both a gopher and web server. To get the web server running, make a copy of the gofish.conf file. A sample gofish-www.conf is provided. It changes the following entries:

root - point it to the web site
logfile - /var/log/gofish.log
pidfile - /var/run/gofish.pid
port - 80 for http, 81 if you want to try it and already have an http server
is-http - must be 1 for a web server

Start the gopher server normally, but point the web server at the new config file. For example:

gopherd -d -c /etc/gofish-www.conf

Virtual Hosts

GoFish supports virtual hosts for the web server. Information on how the virtual hosts work is here.

What can I do to help?

Glad you asked! Please download GoFish and try to compile and run it. Then let me know if it worked or especially if it didn't. I would also appreciate if people would try compiling on OSes other than Linux or Windows.