Proxying

[colecmac at protonmail.com]

Hello Geminauts,

Earlier today I added proxy support to the master branch of gemget[1].
This allows you to specify a host like 1.2.3.4, or example.com:3000,
that will be sent the Gemini request instead of the host specified in
the URL.

This kind of proxying is explicitly support by the Gemini spec, you can read
more about it in section 2.

I will also be adding proxy support to Amfora as well, so that if enabled,
all requests will go through the proxy.

However to my knowledge, no such server exists that can act as a general proxy.
I'd be happy to hear about any, if I've missed something. I forsee that they
could be used in the same way Squid[2] is for the web, as a cache. I think this
could work even better for Gemini then it does for the web, as documents are more
compact and are much less dynamic.

They could also be used for privacy, as many web proxies are.

I have to wonder whether anyone would actually use this. What do you all think of
this workflow/feature? Is it potentially useful? I'm vaguely interested in writing
such a server, but I'd be happy if anyone else beats me to the punch. Keep in mind
that server should also cache and serve TLS certs, so that they match the domain
being requested.


1: https://github.com/makeworld-the-better-one/gemget/commit/23048d309ed7f75cab79bb5daecc4a60f3b1587f
2: http://www.squid-cache.org/


makeworld

P.S. See the FetchWithHost function in go-gemini for a code example of how
the proxying works.