Bore is a command-line tool that builds gopherholes, much like Jekyll builds websites. It's designed to be simple, powerful, and to make creating content for Gopherspace fast and fun.
- Gopher what? Gopher is a simple, text-based internet protocol that came before the web. It's still used by a community of enthusiasts who appreciate its simplicity and focus on content.
- What does Bore do? 🛠️ It takes your text files, Markdown, and templates and turns them into a Gopher site (a "gopherhole") that you can serve with a Gopher server like my Venusia.
- See an example: 🗺️ Check out the example project to see how a Bore site is structured.
- Jekyll Blog Converter: ✒️ Convert your Gopher blog ("phlog") into a Jekyll blog with a single command.
- Gophermap Support: 📜 Full support for
.gophermapfiles and Bucktooth shorthand for creating Gopher menus. - Phlogging Engine: ✍️
- Tagging System: Organize your posts with tags. Bore automatically generates an index page for each tag, as well as a main index for all your posts.
- Atom Feed Generation: Automatically creates an Atom feed for your phlog.
- Markdown Conversion: 📝 Write your content in Markdown and Bore will convert it to be Gopher-friendly, turning links into footnotes to keep your text clean and readable.
- Powerful Templating: 🎨
- Use Mustache-style
{{templates}}for variables and logic. - Figlet Fonts: Create ASCII art text with included Figlet fonts.
- ASCII Art Containers: Wrap your content in customizable ASCII art boxes.
- Word Wrap: Automatically wrap your text to a specified width.
- Parent Templates & Includes: Create a consistent layout with parent templates and include other files as partials.
- Frontmatter: Control how your files are built using YAML frontmatter, similar to Jekyll.
- Use Mustache-style
The easiest way to install Bore is to grab a .deb package from the releases page. You can also build it from source using stack build.
Bore has an opinionated but simple directory structure. To create a new phlog post, create a new file in the phlog/ directory. The file extension is important; use .gopher.txt for plain text or .gopher.md for Markdown.
For example, create phlog/my-first-post.gopher.txt with the following content:
---
date: 2025-03-09
title: "My First Post"
tags: [getting-started, gopher]
---
Hello, world! This is my first post in my new gopherhole.draft: true: Add this to your frontmatter to hide a post from the generated indexes.gophermap: true: Add this to turn your post into a Gopher menu instead of a text file.
To build your gopherhole, run the following command in your project's root directory:
bore build- This will generate your site in the
output/directory by default. You can change the source and output directories with the--sourceand--outputflags. - Use the
--dev-modeflag to set the hostname tolocalhostfor easy local testing.
One of Bore's powerful features is its ability to convert your phlog into a Jekyll-compatible blog. When you use this feature, Bore will also copy any images referenced in your posts from your assets/ directory to a corresponding assets/phlog directory in your Jekyll project, making it easy to keep your images organized.
To do this, run the jekyll command:
bore jekyll --source /path/to/your/gopherhole --output /path/to/your/jekyll-site/Bore provides two special frontmatter fields to control the Jekyll output:
skipJekyll: true: This will prevent the post from being included in the Jekyll build.jekyll: { ... }: Any YAML you put here will be added to the frontmatter of the generated Jekyll post. This is great for adding things like images, captions, or other Jekyll-specific metadata.
Example:
---
date: 2024-05-17
parent: post.txt
title: Productivity in Window Maker
tags: [windowmaker, debian, linux]
jekyll:
image:
path: /assets/screenshot-window-maker.png
thumbnail: /assets/screenshot-window-maker.png
caption: My Window Maker setup (screenshot).
---
I use the old school, lightweight [Window Maker](http://www.windowmaker.org/)
[window manager](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Window_manager) on Debian
Unstable.This will be converted to a Jekyll post with the image data in the frontmatter.
When you build your site, Bore clears out the output directory before generating new files. However, the assets/ subdirectory of the output directory is special: it will not be wiped. This makes it the perfect place to store large files, images, or anything else you want to include in your gopherhole that Bore shouldn't process.
Let's make a secure/chroot'd setup for sftp'ing source (and assets) updates using the pre-existing bore user the package installs.
I have to update this for instructions on using with Venusia.
Create the required directories:
sudo mkdir -p /var/gopher/.ssh
Then add SSH public key for the bore user in /var/gopher/.ssh/authorized_keys:
ssh-rsa AAAAB3Nza... your_key_here
Then add the following lines to your /etc/ssh/sshd_config:
Match User bore
ChrootDirectory /var/gopher
AuthorizedKeysFile /var/gopher/.ssh/authorized_keys
ForceCommand internal-sftp
PermitTunnel no
AllowAgentForwarding no
AllowTcpForwarding no
X11Forwarding no
Finalize some permissions:
sudo chown root:root /var/gopher
sudo chmod 755 /var/gopher
sudo chown -R bore:bore /var/gopher/.ssh
sudo chmod 700 /var/gopher/.ssh
sudo chown -R bore:bore /var/gopher/source
sudo chown -R bore:bore /var/gopher/output
Finally restart sudo systemctl restart ssh, although you may also want to sudo service bore restart.
Install lftp:
sudo apt-get install lftp
Now if you want to copy your source directory (local to remote):
lftp -e "mirror -R /path/to/local_directory /source/; quit" -u bore, sftp://simulacra
... or to ensure old files are deleted (mirror remote/local):
lftp -e "mirror -R --delete ./ /source/; quit" -u bore, sftp://simulacra
Just copy a single file to assets folder:
lftp -e "put -O /output/assets/ 'cool picture.jpg'; quit" -u bore, sftp://simulacra