Gopher Browser

A very-experimental browser for Gopher protocol with basic support for Gopher+, Gopher-over-TLS, and Markdown. Although largely usable, it is still very-much at an early-alpha level of quality & reliability and so is not ready for active use by users. There is also significant refactoring that can be done to improve the code readability & extensibility.

The general architecture is that there is a small Deno HTTP server that runs as a backend offering a basic API for interacting with Gopher servers. There is then a React-based GUI app that communicates with this backend and renders the output. The React GUI can be run directly in a browser for local development, or run in a "webview" for a native-style desktop experience:

• browser.ts Sets up a normal HTTP server for local testing of the GUI.
• webview.ts Sets up a webview and displays the GUI through that.
• /gui_server.ts Handles requests from the webview (...or browser...) for rendering the GUI.
• /gopher.ts Handles interactions with the Gopher protocol client.
• /gui Contains a React-based web app that is rendered inside a webview.

The bulk of the logic and complexity is within this React GUI. Yes - the irony of a javascript-heavy React webapp that acts as a Gopher browser is recognised.

Development workflow

During development the 'best' way to work is to run the React GUI direclty in the browser, and then also run the GUI-server simultanesouly to serve API calls.

This will allow the GUI to make requests to the API endpoints in the GUI-server while still allowing for a fast edit-reload cycle for the GUI. It also has the benefit of doing real Gopher requests (from the GUI-server) and you can use all the usual browser-based dev tools (e.g. React extension etc).

# Run the GUI-server to handle API calls:
deno run -Ar browser.ts --watch

# Simultaneously run the GUI which can be viewed in a browser:
cd gui
npm start

Eventually, we should provide a way to mock out the GUI-server entirely.

GUI

This was created with Create React App - see README in /gui for more details.

To run locally in a browser during development

cd gui
npm start

To actually have some files to be served from the built-in HTTP server, you need to run npm run build to generate the assets in the gui/build dir.