Posts from July 12, 2026

I've just released Rogallo v0.6.0, which contains the last big feature that was missing to make it a viable daily-driver Gemini Protocol client. That feature? Client certificates.

From now on, if you visit a capsule that requests a client certificate, rather than an error being shown, a dialog will pop up:

When you select the Create button, the certificate will be created and then, from then on, when you visit the capsule, that client certificate will be used.

As you might have noticed, there are "advanced options" available too. Most are just optional values that go into the certificate itself:

The two advanced options that mostly affect how all of this works are the scope and the transient option. The transient option means that the certificate is only good for the lifetime of this run of Rogallo. If you close Rogallo, the certificate will be discarded. In almost all cases, you'll want to leave this turned off.

The scope toggle affects the scoping of the certificate. As I've been able to understand, the strict reading of the Gemini Protocol says that a certificate should be scoped to the host, port, and path where it was first requested and generated for. However, out in the real world, it seems there are applications built for the protocol that don't work well with that approach. With this in mind, I've built Rogallo to always scope to just the domain and port, by default. If you want a particular certificate to follow the strict letter of the specification, turn the "Scope to domain/port" option off.

With all that in place, it should now be possible to use Rogallo with any Gemini application that needs client-side authentication. For the last couple of days, I've been using it to successfully play AstroBotany, for example.

As I said: with this in place, I believe Rogallo has all of the basic requirements of a Gemini protocol client covered. I'm not quite ready to call it v1.0.0 just yet -- there's a fair bit of testing and tweaking I still want to do, and I can see that, when it comes to certificates for example, there's some extra error handling I need to throw in. Additionally, the "advanced" version of the certificate create dialog is kind of tall for many terminals; I think I might need to play with the layout a bit.

Also, as I've mentioned a few times: I want to get proper documentation written and hosted on a dedicated site.

Back to this release: there's also a handful of other QoL changes and fixes. These include:

• Any page that is opened from an in-page link is now always retrieved from the remote location, bypassing any cached copy. The idea being that, if someone is actively navigating documents, they will want the freshest version of the new page.
• Fixed the layout of list items. Before now, the text wasn't wrapping, while, at the same time, space was being made for the text as if it was being wrapped.
• The bookmark search palette is no longer available if there are no bookmarks to search (the idea being that not being available is less confusing than being available but empty).
• The connection timeout, read timeout, and maximum number of redirects can now be set in the configuration file.
• The title area of the viewer now has a key icon that appears if a page is using a client certificate.
• Pages that require a client-side certificate are never added to the cache (the idea being that such pages are more likely to have dynamic content, and so the freshest version should always be loaded).
• Reworked what is recorded in navigation and location history to ensure that what is saved is the landing URI, not the URI that was first visited. This solves the problem of what happens during redirections, and so also solves the issue of what happens with 10/11 response inputs (having the resulting query appear in history could result in duplicated "submissions" to whatever app was in use).

With these enhancements and fixes in place, I'm going to keep tending my plant, and posting away on Station, as a way of continuing to shake down the application. With that in mind, if anyone knows of any other sites and apps I should be testing against out in Geminispace, do let me know!

By this point today I was hoping to have released a new version of Rogallo, complete with client certificate support. It is more or less all there and ready to go, but I ran into a small problem, something which confused me.

You see, according to the documentation for the Gemini Protocol, when there's a request by a capsule for a client certificate, that certificate should be scoped to the host, port and path and all paths below it. So that means that if example.com/foo causes a certificate to be requested, it's good for example.com/foo and example.com/foo/bar, but it isn't valid for example.com/other.

Makes sense.

The problem I ran into pretty quickly, with my implementation of this in Wasat and Rogallo, was this: I hit a site (a microblogging site of sorts) that had a joining page at example.com/join. Once you joined up and set your user name, you'd normally land at example.com/me. They're sibling paths and so should not use the same certificate. However, this was done via redirection, so I did some work to "clone" a certificate when there's a redirection.

But then it got more complicated. The site also lets you follow other people. This means that if you visit example.com/other-user you should also still have the client certificate in place so the capsule knows who you are (because client certificates are also, in effect, session cookies, as I understand it), so you can perform the follow. Again, this is a sibling path, and there's no redirection, so the certificate is no good because, at this point, it's scoped to example.com/join and example.com/me.

Meanwhile: testing this with Lagrange, it had no such problem whatsoever. How was it getting around this issue? Was I doing something wrong? Was I misreading the specification for the protocol? Was Lagrange being a bit more relaxed about its certificate scope?

After doing some digging, it would seem that it's the latter. It looks like it, and perhaps other clients, take a pragmatic approach to certificate scopes and generally scope them to the host and port alone, ignoring the path (in the case of Lagrange it seems to sort of actually divorce the certificates from the URIs anyway, treating certificates more as identities you can associate with any capsule, etc).

Given this, at least for now, I'm going to take that approach. Any time a certificate needs to be generated in Rogallo, I'm going to give the user the option (on by default) to scope the certificate to the whole host/port combination. Later on I might add the ability to fully manage certificates (right now that can be done by editing the certificates file in the data directory, but a proper UI for it would be nice).

Which brings me to this release of Wasat. v0.4.0 adds some extra functionality to GeminiURI that allows changing and removing individual parts of the URI. There's a new replace method that can be used to create a clone of a URI with various parts changed. Also, if you just want to change one specific part or simply prefer method chaining approaches, I've also added more with_ methods similar to the pre-existing with_query method, so now there's also with_host, with_port and with_path.

With these in place I can go back to Rogallo and carry on with the last bits of work I want to do on client certificate support, with Wasat making it easy for me to clone up and chop and change URIs to suit the scoping requirements.