Hosting a Gopher Server on Digital Ocean

This guide will give you an idea how I set up the Gopher Server on a Digital Ocean Droplet. This guide is also valid for other VPS providers and somewhat valid for hosting from home. Just be aware that some things may be in different places on differ providers.

Create the Droplet on digital ocean

1. Log in to your Digital Ocean control panel

2. Click Droplets (left hand side) then "Create Droplet" (button in the top right ish)

3. Choose your location, preferable the closest to you

4. Set the OS as Ubuntu and version 24.04 LTS

5. Change the Droplet plan to Basic, CPU options to regular and then scroll to the left and choose the cheapest option, there's no point in anything bigger as Gopher uses so little bandwidth, it's not worth spending the extra money - $4 a month is an acceptable cost

6. Select the Password option and choose your password (or, you could setup SSH keys here if you want)

7. Choose a host name, then click the "Create Droplet" button

Logging and updating the Droplet

1. Log in to the droplet with your chosen method (either through the "Console" button in Digital Ocean, or, via SSH)

2. Execute the following command
   apt update && apt upgrade -y

Installing the Gopher hosting software

1. Once the update has completed, install the pygopherd package with the following command
   apt install pygopherd -y

2. Once installed, you should check the configuration by editing the file /etc/pygopherd/pygopherd.conf

3. Scroll down to the server name section and set it to equal the fully qualified domain name of your DNS record that you are going to use, save the file

Securing the server with the built-in firewall

1. Firstly, execute the following commands to setup the firewall

   1. ufw allow ssh

   2. ufw allow tcp/70

   3. ufw allow http

   4. ufw enable

2. Check you can still access the server before logging out

Set up your DNS record

This step is somewhat beyond the scope of this guide, as every DNS provider is different, however, navigate to the DNS records section and create an A record pointing to the IP address of the Digital Ocean droplet (viewable in the Digital Ocean control panel)

Create the content

Really easy, basically edit the gophermap file in the /var/gopher/ directory.
Pygopherd does put a default one in this directory that you can view to get an idea on how to create a gophermap

Viewing the gopher hole

So, there's several ways - the best is to use a Gopher compatible browser, however, if you browse via normal HTTP to your gopher server, pygopherd provides basic proxy-ing, but note that formatting and ASCII-art will not appear properly due to it using a proportional font instead of a fixed width font

Another option, is to use the Floodgap proxy on the following URL: https://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/gw/ - if you put your gopher server's URL on the end, it'll take you straight there

But, the best way is to either use a text mode browser compatible with gopher (so Lynx or W3M) or a graphical equivalent

Some Gopher compatible graphical browsers

• Gophie (versions for Mac, Linux and Windows)

• Little Gopher Client (versions for Mac, Linux and Windows)

• Lagrange (this is a Gemini browser with Gopher compatibility too - versions for Mac, Linux and Windows)