ipfs-gopher is a gopher proxy that allows serving gopher over IPFS. For plain files, it just forwards the file content to the client. For menus, it uses a simple format with a header to distinguish menus from other files, and to use the local proxy when resolving IPFS links.
$ ipfs-gopher &
$ curl gopher://localhost:7070/1/ipfs/QmRgTQvW7ab1bwjmeL4EQh1AVcWrUJn5ou3g1jv9aAqgRo/menu1
$ ipfs-gopher -h
Usage of ipfs-gopher:
-daemon string
The address of the IPFS daemon (default "localhost:5001")
-host string
The host to use in IPFS selectors (default "localhost")
-listen string
The address of the proxy (default "localhost:7070")
-port string
The port to use in IPFS selectors (default "7070")
Because the menu content presented to the gopher client depends on ipfs-gopher settings and thus need to be modified in transit, we need to separate regular files from menu files. To do this, the menu starts with a single line, containing:
<<<ipfs-gopher-menu>>>
ipfs-gopher menus are otherwise much like plain gopher menus:
<type><name><TAB><selector><TAB><host><TAB><port><CRLF>
The most important difference is that the port and host may be omitted. When they are, the selector should be understood as an IPFS link and ipfs-gopher will fill in the rest of the columns. Relative IPFS links may be used as selectors.
You may also omit the selector (useful for info type entries). Finally, ipfs-gopher menu files may use Unix style line endings (LF) as well as network style line endings (CRLF).
Because the settings are client dependent, I suggest that any non-IPFS gopher hole that wants to link to an ipfs-gopher hole should do so through the hostname "ipfs-gopher" on port 7070. This way, users can create a host alias for their preferred host. If not, a Sufficiently Smart™ Gopher client could also replace the "ipfs-gopher" hostname with the preferred hostname and the port with the preferred port.
- Report IPFS errors to client