apellis / pygemini

A python implementation of the Gemini protocol

pygemini

This is a hobby project. Please have no expectations! The goal is to write a "good enough" implementation (client and server) of the Gemini protocol.

TODO

Here are some TODO items, very roughly in descending order of importance.

• Add good docstrings
• Make the client render text/gemini responses nicely instead of dumping the raw text.
• Add TLS to client and server, including client certificates.
  • There's a lot to do here (e.g. handling of transient client certificates).
• Add rate limiting to the server. Add automatic retry with backoff to the client when it receives a 44 (slow down) response. Maybe also a few retries for other 4x codes.
• Add unit tests.
• Add support for proxies.
• Add support for redirects.
• Figure out a way to catch all exceptions and return either 40 (temporary failure) or 42 (CGI error) in these cases. It's not clear how to do this while using socketserver.TCPServer.
  • Using the server class's handle_error doesn't work, since by the time that's called, the socket is already closed (see the source: https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/master/Lib/socketserver.py).
  • Adding a try-catch block around the handler seems to mess with assumptions in the server or handler in a way I don't yet understand. Even using TCPServer instead of ThreadingTCPServer, this always leads to either "Connection reset by peer" or an empty-bytestring response.
• Handle MIME types other than text/plain and text/gemini. The server should detect these from filenames, and the client should take appropriate actions.
• Don't always assume text/plain and text/gemini use UTF-8.
• Add integration tests.
• Server should refuse to serve very large files and send a useful error message to the client.
• Client should limit the number of consecutive redirects to avoid an infinite loop (say max of 5).
• Add support for gopher:// URLs (user must explicitly agree because gopher has no TLS).