Joker CGI Guestbook

This is a toy old-school CGI guestbook implemented in Joker, a dialect of Clojure. The shebang line reflects that I wrote it for use on the SDF Public Access UNIX System.

Description

The guestbook is a self-contained CGI script with no dependencies except Joker 1.4.0 or later. Like old CGI scripts, it has editable configuration at the top. Data is stored in a Bolt database, which Joker has built in. Captchas are stateless and use HMAC to verify the solved challenge is authentic and recent. The secret key for HMAC is generated automatically and stored in the database. This is a reason to forbid public access to it.

There is no management interface. Use boltbrowser to browse and edit the database. To hide an entry without deleting it:

1. Find the entry in the Bolt bucket entries.
2. Edit the JSON object to add a key hide with the value true.

This project is a toy. I don't know how actively I am going to maintain it. Expect less testing, feature development, and support than from a regular project.

Screenshot

Setup

You will need an HTTP server with CGI enabled, like Apache or Caddy.

1. Download or build a Joker binary. Binaries for Free/Net/OpenBSD, Linux, Mac, and Windows are attached to Joker releases. Install the binary on your server. On a public Unix system like SDF, you may be able to install the binary in your home directory and use it for CGI.

2. Download the source code file of the guestbook, guestbook.joke. You can and should clone the repository to track your customizations in Git. Edit the file. Update the shebang line to the absolute path to your Joker interpreter. Update the settings as desired.

3. Create a directory like /guestbook/ in your server's CGI root. Copy your customized guestbook.joke to the directory with a filename the server will recognize as a directory-index CGI script, like index.cgi.

4. Access the guestbook on your server (for example, http://localhost/guestbook/) and confirm that it works.

5. Make sure web clients cannot access the database file (for example, http://localhost/guestbook/guestbook.bolt with the default filename guestbook.bolt).

License

MIT. See the file LICENSE.