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Gopher (/ˈɡoʊfər/ ⓘ) is acommunication protocol designed for distributing, searching, and retrieving documents inInternet Protocol networks. The design of the Gopher protocol and user interface is menu-driven, and presented an alternative to theWorld Wide Web inits early stages, but ultimately fell into disfavor, yielding to Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). The Gopher ecosystem is often regarded as the effective predecessor of the World Wide Web.[1][2]
The Gopher protocol was invented by a team led byMark P. McCahill[3] at theUniversity of Minnesota. It offers some features not natively supported by the Web and imposes a much stronger hierarchy on the documents it stores. Its text menu interface is well-suited to computing environments that rely heavily on remotetext-oriented computer terminals, which were still common at the time of its creation in 1991, and the simplicity of its protocol facilitated a wide variety of client implementations.
Gopher's hierarchical structure provided a platform for the first large-scale electronic library connections.[4] The Gopher protocol is still in use by enthusiasts, and although it has been almost entirely supplanted by the Web, a small population of actively maintained servers remains.[2]
The Gopher system was released in mid-1991 by Mark P. McCahill, Farhad Anklesaria, Paul Lindner, Daniel Torrey, and Bob Alberti of theUniversity of Minnesota in the United States.[5] Its central goals were, as stated inRFC 1436:
Gopher combines document hierarchies with collections of services, includingWAIS, theArchie andVeronicasearch engines, and gateways to other information systems such asFile Transfer Protocol (FTP) andUsenet.
The general interest in campus-wide information systems (CWISs) in higher education at the time,[6] and the ease of setup of Gopher servers to create an instant CWIS with links to other sites' online directories and resources, were the factors contributing to Gopher's rapid adoption.
The name was coined by Anklesaria as a play on several meanings of the word "gopher".[7] TheUniversity of Minnesota mascot is thegopher,[8] agofer is an assistant who "goes for" things, and agopher burrows through the ground to reach a desired location.[9]
TheWorld Wide Web was in its infancy in 1991, and Gopher services quickly became established.[10] By the late 1990s, Gopher had ceased expanding. Several factors contributed to Gopher's stagnation:
Gopher remains in active use by its enthusiasts, and there have been attempts to revive Gopher on modern platforms and mobile devices. One attempt is The Overbite Project,[18] which hosts various browser extensions and modern clients.
| Index Date | Gopher Servers | Unique Selectors | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 19 March 2007 | 86 | 740,000 | [20] |
| 3 January 2008 | 148 | 1,220,665 | [24] |
| 2012 | approx. 160 | approx. 2,500,000 | |
| November 2014 | 144 | approx. 3,000,000 | |
| 15 October 2015 | 144 | 3,314,158 | [25] |
| 25 April 2016 | 137 | 4,396,061 | [26] |
| 15 August 2017 | 146 | 5,176,602 | [27] |
| May 2018 | 260 | approx. 3,700,000 | |
| 10 December 2018 | 297 | 3,946,750 | [28] |
| May 2019 | 320 | approx. 4,200,000 | |
| January 2020 | 395 | approx. 4,500,000 | |
| 18 November 2020 | 358 | 5,973,552 | [29] |
| 18 October 2021 | 343 | 5,294,599 | [30] |
| 11 October 2022 | 333 | 5,098,733 | [31] |
| 17 February 2024 | 323 | 5,113,957 | [32] |
| 19 June 2025 | 296 | 5,113,382 | [33] |
| 29 August 2025 | 432 | 5,254,158 | [34] |
| 28 January 2026 | 411 | 5,856,111 | [35] |
The conceptualization of knowledge in "Gopher space" or a "cloud" as specific information in a particular file, and the prominence of the FTP, influenced the technology and the resulting functionality of Gopher.
Gopher is designed to function and to appear much like a mountable read-only globalnetwork file system (and software, such asgopherfs, is available that can actually mount a Gopher server as aFUSE resource). At a minimum, whatever can be done with data files on aCD-ROM, can be done on Gopher.
A Gopher system consists of a series of hierarchical hyperlinkable menus. The choice of menu items and titles is controlled by the administrator of the server.
Similar to a file on a Web server, a file on a Gopher server can be linked to as a menu item from any other Gopher server. Many servers take advantage of this inter-server linking to provide a directory of other servers that the user can access.
The Gopher protocol was first described inRFC 1436.Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) has assignedTransmission Control Protocol (TCP)port 70 to the Gopher protocol. The protocol is simple to negotiate, making it possible to browse without using a client.
First, the client establishes a TCP connection with the server on port 70, the standard gopher port. The client then sends a string followed by a carriage return followed by aline feed (a "CR + LF" sequence). This is the selector, which identifies the document to be retrieved. If the item selector were an empty line, the default directory would be selected.
The server then replies with the requested item and closes the connection. According to the protocol, before the connection closes, the server should send a full-stop (i.e., a period character) on a line by itself. However, not all servers conform to this part of the protocol and the server may close a connection without returning a final full-stop. The main type of reply from the server is a text or binary resource. Alternatively, the resource can be a menu: a form of structured text resource providing references to other resources.
Because of the simplicity of the Gopher protocol, tools such asnetcat make it possible to download Gopher content easily from a command line:
$echojacks/jack.exe|ncgopher.example.org70>jack.exe
The protocol is also supported bycURL since 7.21.2-DEV, which was released in 2010.[36]
The selector string in the request can optionally be followed by a tab character and a search string. This is used by item type 7.
Gopher menu items are defined by lines oftab-separated values in atext file. This file is sometimes called agophermap. As thesource code to a gopher menu, a gophermap is roughly analogous to anHTML file for aweb page. Each tab-separated line (called aselector line) gives theclient software a description of the menu item: what it is, what it is called, and where it leads to. The client displays the menu items in the order that they appear in the gophermap.
The first character in a selector line indicates theitem type, which tells the client what kind of file or protocol the menu item points to. This helps the client decide what to do with it. Gopher's item types are a more basic precursor to themedia type system used by the Web andemail attachments.
The item type is followed by theuser display string (a description or label that represents the item in the menu); the selector (apath or other string for the resource on the server); thehostname (thedomain name orIP address of the server), and thenetwork port.
All lines in a gopher menu are terminated by "CR + LF".
Example of a selector line in a menu source: The following selector line generates a link to the "/home"directory at thesubdomain gopher.floodgap.com, onport 70. The item type of1 indicates that the linked resource is a Gopher menu itself. The string "Floodgap Home" is what the client will show to the user when visiting the example menu.
1Floodgap Home/homegopher.floodgap.com70
| Item type | User display string | Selector | Hostname | Port |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Floodgap Home | /home | gopher.floodgap.com | 70 |
In a Gopher menu's source code, a one-character code indicates what kind of content the client should expect. This code may either be a digit or a letter of the alphabet; letters arecase-sensitive.
Thetechnical specification for Gopher,RFC 1436, defines 14 item types. The later gopher+ specification defined an additional 3 types.[37] A one-character code indicates what kind of content the client should expect. Item type3 is anerror code forexception handling. Gopher client authors improvised item typesh (HTML),i (informational message), ands (sound file) after the publication of RFC 1436. Browsers like Netscape Navigator and early versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer would prepend the item type code to the selector as described inRFC 4266, so that the type of the gopher item could be determined by the url itself. Most gopher browsers still available, use these prefixes in their urls.
| Canonical types | |
|---|---|
| 0 | Text file |
| 1 | Gopher submenu |
| 2 | CCSO Nameserver |
| 3 | Error code returned by a Gopher server to indicate failure |
| 4 | BinHex-encoded file (primarily forMacintosh computers) |
| 5 | DOS file |
| 6 | uuencoded file |
| 7 | Gopherfull-text search |
| 8 | Telnet |
| 9 | Binary file |
| + | Mirror or alternate server (forload balancing or in case of primary serverdowntime) |
| g | GIF file |
| I | Image file |
| T | Telnet 3270 |
| gopher+ types | |
| : | Bitmap image |
| ; | Movie file |
| < | Sound file |
| Non-canonical types | |
| d | Doc. Seen used alongside PDF and .doc files |
| h | HTML file |
| i | Informational message, widely used.[38] |
| p | image file "(especially thePNG format)" |
| r | document RTF file ("Rich Text Format") |
| s | Sound file (especially theWAV format) |
| P | PDF (Portable Document Format) file |
| X | XML (Extensible Markup Language) file |
Here is an example gopher session where the user requires a gopher menu (/Reference on the first line):
/Reference1CIA World Factbook /Archives/mirrors/textfiles.com/politics/CIA gopher.quux.org 700Jargon 4.2.0 /Reference/Jargon 4.2.0 gopher.quux.org 70 +1Online Libraries /Reference/Online Libraries gopher.quux.org 70 +1RFCs: Internet Standards /Computers/Standards and Specs/RFC gopher.quux.org 701U.S. Gazetteer /Reference/U.S. Gazetteer gopher.quux.org 70 +iThis file contains information on United States fake (NULL) 0icities, counties, and geographical areas. It has fake (NULL) 0ilatitude/longitude, population, land and water area, fake (NULL) 0iand ZIP codes. fake (NULL) 0i fake (NULL) 0iTo search for a city, enter the city's name. To search fake (NULL) 0ifor a county, use the name plus County -- for instance, fake (NULL) 0iDallas County. fake (NULL) 0
The gopher menu sent back from the server is a sequence of lines, each of which describes an item that can be retrieved. Most clients will display these ashypertext links, and so allow the user to navigate through gopherspace by following the links.[5]This menu includes a text resource (itemtype0 on the third line), multiple links to submenus (itemtype1, on the second line as well as lines 4–6) and a non-standard information message (from line 7 on), broken down to multiple lines by providing dummy values for selector, host and port.
Historically, to create a link to a Web server, "GET /" was used as a pseudo-selector to emulate anHTTPGET request.[39] John Goerzen created an addition[40] to the Gopher protocol, commonly referred to as "URL links", that allows links to any protocol that supports URLs. For example, to create a link tohttp://gopher.quux.org/, the item type ish, the display string is the title of the link, the item selector is "URL:http://gopher.quux.org/", and the domain and port are that of the originating Gopher server (so that clients that do not support URL links will query the server and receive an HTML redirection page).
Gopher+ is a forward compatible enhancement to the Gopher protocol. Gopher+ works by sendingmetadata between the client and the server. The enhancement was never widely adopted by Gopher servers.[41][42][43]The client sends a tab followed by a +. A Gopher+ server will respond with a status line followed by the content the client requested. An item is marked as supporting Gopher+ in the Gopher directory listing by a tab + after the port (this is the case of some of the items in the example above).
Other features of Gopher+ include:
These are clients, libraries, and utilities primarily designed to access gopher resources.
| Client | Updated | License | Language | Type | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ACID | 2021 | ? | C | GUI (Windows) | Supports page cache, TFTP and has G6 extension. |
| Bombadillo | 2022 | GPLv3 | Go | TUI (Linux, BSD,macOS) | Supports Gopher, Gemini, Finger |
| elpher | 2022 | GPLv3 | Emacs Lisp | TUI/GUI | Elpher: a gopher, finger, and gemini client for GNU Emacs |
| eva | 2022 | GPLv3 | Rust | GUI (Linux, FreeBSD) | Eva (as in extra vehicular activity, or spacewalk) is a Gemini and Gopher protocol browser in GTK 4. |
| Gopher Browser | 2019 | Closed source | VB.NET | GUI (Windows) | |
| Gopher Client | 2018 | App (iOS)[44] | Supports text reflow, bookmarks, history, etc. | ||
| gophercle | 2022 | MIT | Java | App (Android) | Supports only basic functionalities like bookmarks, session-history, downloads, etc. |
| Gopherus | 2020 | BSD 2-clause | C | TUI (Linux, BSD, Windows, DOS) | Features bookmarks and page caching. |
| Gophie | 2020 | GPLv3 | Java | GUI (Windows, MacOS, Linux) | |
| Kristall | 2020 | GPLv3 | C++ | GUI (Linux) | Gemini GUI client with support for Gopher, Finger, and www. |
| Lagrange | 2022 | BSD 2-clause | C | GUI | Gemini GUI client with Gopher and finger support. Switches to gophermap/type 1 requests in parent/root navigation.[45] |
| Little Gopher Client | 2019 | Pascal | Linux, Mac, Windows | Sidebar with a hierarchical view | |
| ncgopher | 2022 | BSD 2-clause | Rust | TUI | ncgopher is a gopher and gemini client using ncurses. |
| Pocket Gopher | 2019 | Unlicense | Java | App (Android) | Supports bookmarks, history, downloads, etc. |
| sacc | 2022 | C | TUI | sacc(omys) is a terminal gopher client. | |
| snarf | 2020 | GPL | C | CLI | Simple Non-interactive All-purpose Resource Fetcher |
| w3m | 2021 | MIT | C | TUI | w3m is a text-based web browser |
Clients like web browsers, libraries, and utilities primarily designed to access World Wide Web resources, but which maintain(ed) gopher support.
Browsers with no Gopher native support can still access servers using one of the available Gopher toHTTP gateways orproxy server that converts Gopher menus intoHTML; known proxies are the Floodgap Public Gopher proxy and Gopher Proxy. Similarly, certain server packages such as GN and PyGopherd have built-in Gopher toHTTP interfaces.Squid Proxy software gateways anygopher:// URL to HTTP content, enabling any browser or web agent to access gopher content easily.
ForMozillaFirefox andSeaMonkey, Overbite[18] extensions extend Gopher browsing and support the current versions of the browsers (Firefox Quantum v ≥57 and equivalent versions of SeaMonkey):
gopher:// URLs to a proxy;OverbiteWX includes support for accessing Gopher servers not on port 70 using a whitelist and forCSO/ph queries. OverbiteFF always uses port 70.ForChromium andGoogle Chrome, Burrow[51] is available. It redirectsgopher:// URLs to a proxy. In the past an Overbite proxy-based extension for these browsers was available but is no longer maintained and does not work with the current (>23) releases.[18]
ForKonqueror, Kio gopher[56] is available.
As the bandwidth-sparing simple interface of Gopher can be a good match formobile phones andpersonal digital assistants (PDAs),[57] the early 2010s saw a renewed interest in native Gopher clients for popularsmartphones.
Gopher popularity was at its height at a time when there were still many equally competing computer architectures and operating systems. As a result, there are several Gopher clients available forAcorn RISC OS,AmigaOS, AtariMiNT,Conversational Monitor System (CMS),DOS,classic Mac OS,MVS,NeXT,OS/2 Warp, mostUnix-like operating systems,VMS,Windows 3.x, andWindows 9x.GopherVR was a client designed for 3D visualization, and there is even a Gopher client inMOO.[58][59] Most such clients arehard-coded to work onTransmission Control Protocol (TCP)port 70.[60]
Because the protocol is trivial to implement in a basic fashion, there are many server packages still available, and some are still maintained.
| Server | Developed by | Latest version | Release date | License | Written in | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Aftershock | Rob Linwood | 1.0.1 | 22 April 2004 | MIT | Java | |
| Apache::GopherHandler | Timm Murray | 0.1 | 26 March 2004 | GPLv2 or any later version | Perl | Apache 2 plugin to runGopher-Server. |
| Atua | Charles Childers | 2017.4 | 9 October 2017 | ISC | Forth | |
| Bucktooth (gopher link) (proxied link) | Cameron Kaiser | 0.2.10 | 10 February 2024 | Floodgap Free Software License | Perl | |
| Flask-Gopher | Michael Lazar | 2.2.1 | 11 April 2020 | GPLv3 | Python | |
| geomyid | Quinn Evans | 0.0.1 | 10 August 2015 | BSD 2-clause | Common Lisp | |
| geomyidae (gopher link) (proxied link) | Christoph Lohmann | 0.96 | 26 August 2022 | MIT | C | REST dynamic scripting, gopher TLS support, compatibility layer for other gophermaps |
| GoFish | Sean MacLennan | 1.2 | 8 October 2010 | GPLv2 | C | |
| go-gopher | James Mills | 31 March 2022 | MIT | Go | ||
| Gopher-Server | Timm Murray | 0.1.1 | 26 March 2004 | GPLv2 | Perl | |
| Gophernicus | Kim Holviala and others | 3.1.1 | 3 January 2021 | BSD 2-clause | C | |
| gophrier | Guillaume Duhamel | 0.2.3 | 29 March 2012 | GPLv2 | C | |
| Goscher | Aaron W. Hsu | 8.0 | 20 June 2011 | ISC | Scheme | |
| mgod | Mate Nagy | 1.1 | 29 January 2018 | GPLv3 | C | |
| Motsognir | Mateusz Viste | 1.0.13 | 8 January 2021 | MIT | C | extensible through custom gophermaps, CGI and PHP scripts |
| Pituophis | dotcomboom | 1.1 | 16 May 2020 | BSD 2-clause | Python | Python-based Gopher library with both server and client support |
| PyGopherd | Michael Lazar | 3.0.1 | 25 February 2024 | GPLv2 | Python | Also supports HTTP, WAP, and Gopher+ |
| Redis | Salvatore Sanfilippo | 6.2.5 | 21 July 2021 | 3-clause BSD | C | Support removed in version 7[61] |
| save_gopher_server | SSS8555 | 0.777 | 7 July 2020 | ? | Perl | with G6 extension and TFTP |
| Spacecookie | Lukas Epple | 1.0.0.0 | 17 March 2021 | GPLv3 | Haskell | |
| Xylophar | Nathaniel Leveck | 0.0.1 | 15 January 2020 | GPLv3 | FreeBASIC |
OmniWeb 5.9.2 Released 1 April 2009: Implemented ground-breaking support for the revolutionary Gopher protocol—a first for WebKit-based browsers! For a list of Gopher servers, see the Floodgap list. Enjoy!. The same text appears in the 5.10 release of 27 August 2009 further down the page, copied from the 5.9.2 unstable branch. The Floodgap list referred to is atFloodgap: new Gopher servers and does not itself refer to April Fools' Day.
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