How to connect locally?

[ghost]

I've started a server with a test page on a raspberry pi. I have a client (Elaho) on my phone. I've tried gemini://<ip address>:1965 but get the error:

The operation couldn’t be completed. (Network.NWError error 0.)

I followed these instructions: http://techrights.org/2021/02/23/gemini-server-with-agate/

[ghost]

Thanks Johann. I didn't realise GitHub stripped away my angle brackets and text. I'm actually using:

gemini://<my ip>:1965. In my case 192.168.0.101

The terminal where I started agate outputs the following each time Elaho tries to connect:

[2021-11-15T16:42:43Z WARN agate] 192.168.0.101:1965 - "" 00 "TLS error" error:unexpected error: no server certificate chain resolved

I did try to generate one in .certificates using the following:

openssl req -new -newkey rsa:4096 -x509 -sha512 -days 3650 -nodes -out Certificate.crt -keyout PrivateKey.key

Is that incorrect? I'm just looking for a self-signed setup so I can get back to my aim of generating gemini pages dynamically from a separate process.

[Johann150]

If you use an IP address, Elaho can not send TLS Server Name Identification (SNI) which is required by the Gemini protocol. That actually means I was wrong in my other answer (which is why I have hidden it). With Gemini it is impossible to use an IP address for the Gemini protocol because SNI is required.

Instead you could try to set up your own local DNS server, or simpler manipulate your /etc/hosts file, or simpler yet install a Gemini client on the same device as you are running Agate on to make use of the localhost hostname that exists by default. This name can also be used for certificates.

Since the article you linked was written for Agate major version 2 while the current major version is 3, you will probably find the added --hostname flag interesting: If you use --hostname localhost, Agate will create the necessary certificate to serve as that hostname by itself and you won't need to use openssl.

[ghost]

Thank you again! That worked. I started the server with

$ bin/agate --content gemini/ --hostname localhost --lang enUS

and ran this client for raspberry pi using gemini://localhost as the URL. ( https://github.com/a-h/min )

If I do want to generate the certificates for the wider network in the future, is it a subject independent of this project? Because if it's an independent procedure I should search online instead of asking here.

[Johann150]

You can use the --hostname flag with other hostnames too.