finger/README.md

Finger server written in Rust.

Features:

• Config file support for users and their info
• Support for multiple users
• Support dynamic content in templates (e.g. fetch from an API)

The project is intentionally lightweight:

• Small dependency set (ureq + serde_json)
• Fast startup
• Minimal CLI argument parser using std::env

Build

cargo build

Test

cargo test

Run as CLI

# List known users from ./users
cargo run -- --list

# Render one user profile
cargo run -- bob

Run as finger-like TCP server

# Listen on 127.0.0.1:7979 by default
cargo run -- --serve

# Custom bind and users directory
cargo run -- --serve --bind 0.0.0.0:7979 --users-dir ./users

You can query the server with tools like nc:

printf 'bob\n' | nc 127.0.0.1 7979

Config Format

Each .config file under users/ is plain text.

• The Login: field is used to identify the user.
• If Login: is missing, the filename stem is used.
• Dynamic template tokens are supported:
  • {{url https://example.com}}
  • {{json_url https://example.com/data.json field_name}}

If dynamic fetches fail, the token is replaced with [unavailable].