Gohome

A go/links daemon for your local machine.

Unlike other golink implementations gohome is designed to run on a single user's mac or linux machine. By default DNS and IP settings are configured automatically and deconfigured on exit. Root privileges are required for this functionality.

gohome can continually download and refresh golinks from a central server. This allows integration with an existing link service that may not always be accessible. In this configuration gohome works as a local cache to ensure no workflow disruptions in case of an outage.

By default gohome configures the URL http://gohome to avoid interfering with an existing go domain. Pass --hostname go to allow http://go to resolve to gohome instead.

There is no web interface to add or edit golinks. Instead you can add them manually or periodically pull links from another golinks source.

Quick Start

Local

go install github.com/ebnull/gohome@latest

gohome
open http://gohome/

Homebrew

Via a homebrew tap:

brew install ebnull/gohome/gohome

gohome --hostname go
open http://gohome/

Homebrew can also install gohome as a service running as root. In that case, the default paths are /opt/homebrew/etc/gohome.flags and /opt/homebrew/var/cache/golink_cache.json. You can find log output at /opt/homebrew/var/gohome-stderr.txt.

To write a default configuration to that path, run

gohome --config /opt/homebrew/etc/gohome.flags --write-config

Container

Using a container image for network deployment:

docker run ghcr.io/ebnull/gohome:latest

Creating Links

Creating new links is not supported in the web interface.

To add links manually edit the --cache path, by default ~/.cache/golink_cache.json.

[
  {
    "display": "Foo-Bar",
    "source": "foobar",
    "destination": "http://example.org",
    "owner": "Me"
  }
]

Pulling Links

Links can be pulled from a remote source given by --remote. This is the full URL to a remote JSON file whose contents are a list of links. This file will be updated and merged with already known links every --interval (default: 15m).

Updated links will be written to the cache file specified by --cache.

If a web URL exists to add a new link on the upstream server you can enable golinks to add UI links to it by setting --add-link-url.

Chained Links

If a --chain url is specified and a link is not known, golinks will redirect to this URL (substituting the the link target for %s). This is designed for the case of new links being added that have not yet been cached.

Automatic loopback configuration

By default (controlled by --auto), on a linux or mac machine, gohome will add a local loopback IP address to the loopback interface. This IP address is given as the IP to --bind, which by default is set to 127.0.0.53:80. It will also edit /etc/hosts to enable resolution of the domain name given by --hostname (default gohome). These changes are reverted when golinks exits.

In effect, this allows your local machine to immediately resolve http://gohome and URLs without conflicting with other services running locally.

Binding

To change the bind address use --bind. You'll probably also want to disable autoconfiguration when using this flag the bind address is also used as the loopback address.

By default gohome expects to be able to bind to port 80, which means it needs at least the CAP_NET_BIND_SERVICE capability on linux or root permissions on Mac.

To run without elevated permissions choose a non-default port and disable automatic loopback configuration:

gohome --auto=false --bind 127.0.0.1:8080

Network-wide golinks

You can also use gohome as a server for your network by specifying a bind port without an IP. See golang's net.Listen documentation for more on how --bind is parsed.

gohome --auto=false --bind :8080

Per-user options

golinks supports storing options for each user in cookies.

You can choose to enable no-redirect, which will show an interstitial page to preview the link destination.

Alternately, you can enable no-chain, which will show an error page locally instead of redirecting to the configured remote golink provider.

There is a plain web-ui hosted at the root of the server for configuring these options.

Known Issues

On mac, if you use the default configuration, you'll get a firewall prompt asking you to allow gohome to accept connections even though the 127.0.0.53 local bind is not accesbile from outside the machine. Even if you click deny here golinks will still be accessible locally.

Run-time configuration

gohome accepts flags from the command line, environment variables, and a configuration file (in that order). --config sets the path to the configuration file. The format of this file is defined by ff.PlainParser and by default is located at ~/.config/gohome.flags.

A default configuration file can be written with --write-config.

Example configuration file

# Configuration file for gohome
#
# https://github.com/EBNull/gohome
#
# Syntax:
#   key value
#
# For syntax details, see https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/peterbourgon/ff/v3#PlainParser
#

# The url to add a new golink. If set a link will be displayed when a golink is not found.
#add-link-url

# Automatically alias the bind IP address to the loopback interface
auto true

# The IP and port to bind to
bind 127.0.0.53:80

# The filename to load cached golinks from
cache ~/.cache/golink_cache.json

# The remote URL to chain redirect to (if link not found in local cache)
#chain

# Specifies the location of the hostfile to edit for --auto mode
hostfile /etc/hosts

# The hostname to add to /etc/hosts for --auto mode (resolvable to the bind address)
hostname gohome

# The periodic interval for downloading new golinks
interval 15m0s

# Specifies the loopback adapter interface for --auto mode
loopback-interface lo

# The remote URL to update golinks from
#remote

Build-time configuration

You can set the defaults for some options by passing flags to the go linker. See build.go for the list of overrideable flags or the linker documentation for details.

For example:

go build -ldflags="-X 'github.com/ebnull/gohome/build.DefaultRemote=http://example.org/links.json' -X 'github.com/ebnull/gohome/build.DefaultChain=http://example.org/goto/%s' -X 'github.com/ebnull/gohome/build.DefaultAddLinkUrl=http://example.org/new-link'"

You could also use goreleaser to make a snapshot build with a custom configuration:

goreleaser build --snapshot --clean

License

The standard MIT License.