Terra Toolbox

Yet Another Piper Toolbox

What is this?

This project contains a few tools for working with Piper, a new document-oriented and binary-based network protocol. Due to the "strict" rules imposed by working with raw binary data with defined characteristics it's a simpler alternative to other protocols like Gopher, Gemini, or HTTP.

What is included?

Currently the package includes four tools:

• Rover: A graphical Piper client with Gemtext support.
• Ares: A simple proof-of-concept server with PCGI support.
• PCGI: A simple protocol and library to build CGI-like applications on top of Piper.
• libterra: A (dynamic and static) library to access the self-contained components of the other tools. This currently includes a Piper client with both a low-level and higher-level interface, Piper path resolution, a Gemtext parser, dynamic strings and arrays, and an epoll-based event loop.

Dependencies

To build the package you'll need a GNU-compatible make and a C11/17 compiler. Additionally, to build Rover, you'll have to install the libX11 development files from your distribution.

Building

Simply clone the project and execute make in its root directory:

git clone https://github.com/RandomSoup/terra.git && cd terra
make -j$(nproc)

That will place build files under the build/ directory.

Limitations

All programs and libraries are prepared to work under Linux systems, but won't work on other systems like MacOS or Windows, since they make use of Linux-specific systems call like epoll.

Rover doesn't implement raw file downloads yet.

License and credits

Terra is licensed under a permissive ISC-like license. See LICENSE for more info.

Rover's design was inspired by Castor9, a Plan 9 Gemini browser, and uses the Spleen font, that is licensed under a Simplified BSD License. The original relative URL resolution code was adapted from libpiper's, with permission.