journalist

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Journalist. An RSS aggregator.

Download the latest version for macOS, Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD & Plan9 here.

WARNING: journalist is highly experimental software and not ready for use. Don't rely on it and expect changes in data structures, with no possibility to migrate existing data at the moment.

What is journalist?

Get more information here.

Repository

This repository contains the source code of journalist. The code is being actively developed in the develop branch and only merged into master and tagged with a version as soon as it's stable enough for a release.

If you intend to create PRs, please do so against develop.

Build

make

Info: This will build using the version 0.0.0. You can prefix the make command with VERSION=x.y.z and set x, y and z accordingly if you want the version in journalist --help to be a different one.

Usage

Please make sure to export JOURNALIST_DB="postgres://postgres:[email protected]:5432/journalist" or however your PostgreSQL connection string might look.

You can change the log level using the JOURNALIST_LOG_LEVEL env variable, e.g. JOURNALIST_LOG_LEVEL=10 for debug. By default, the level is set to warn.

Database

Journalist requires you to have your own PostgreSQL database running somewhere. Running it can be as easy as this, in case you're using Docker:

docker run -it --name postgres \
  -e POSTGRES_PASSWORD=postgres \
  -e POSTGRES_DB=journalist \
  -p 127.0.0.1:5432:5432 \
  -d postgres:alpine

There are also plenty of cloud platforms where you can easily launch a fully- managed PostgreSQL instance. For example on DigitalOcean you can get a PostgreSQL single node cluster for as little as $15 per month or, if you use their App Platform, you could get journalist up and running for only $12 per month (including the development database). See Deployment down below for more info.

CLI

The journalist binary is a daemon as well as a CLI client for managing subscriptions and service configuration. There is no way (yet) to manage subscriptions through the Fever API / a RSS client connecting to it.

Listing subscriptions

You can list all feeds a user is subscribed to using the subscriptions command:

JOURNALIST_LOG_LEVEL=10 \
JOURNALIST_DB=postgres://postgres:[email protected]:5432/journalist \
journalist subscriptions

By default this command would list subscriptions for the user nobody (password: nobody). It's possible to specify -u (username) and -p (password) flags in order to list subscriptions for an individual account.

Subscribing to a feed

You can subscribe to a feed by using the subscribe command:

JOURNALIST_LOG_LEVEL=10 \
JOURNALIST_DB=postgres://postgres:[email protected]:5432/journalist \
journalist subscribe https://xn--gckvb8fzb.com/index.xml -g "Cool People"

-g adds the feed to a custom group, in this case Cool People. Groups are automatically created when specified via -g.

By default this command would subscribe as the user nobody (password: nobody). It's possible to specify -u (username) and -p (password) flags in order to subscribe to a feed under an individual account.

Unsubscribing from a feed

You can unsubscribe from a feed by using the unsubscribe command:

JOURNALIST_LOG_LEVEL=10 \
JOURNALIST_DB=postgres://postgres:[email protected]:5432/journalist \
journalist unsubscribe https://xn--gckvb8fzb.com/index.xml

If the feed was the last one in its group, the group is also being removed.

By default this command would unsubscribe as the user nobody (password: nobody). It's possible to specify -u (username) and -p (password) flags in order to unsubscribe from a feed under an individual account.

Running the RSS server

In order to be able to connect using any Fever API capable client you'll need to run journalist in server mode:

JOURNALIST_LOG_LEVEL=10 \
JOURNALIST_DB=postgres://postgres:[email protected]:5432/journalist \
journalist server

You can then connect to it using your favourite Fever API client (e.g. Reeder for macOS/iOS). Simply specify http://localhost:8000/fever/ (or the machine you're running journalist server on) and either use nobody and nobody as credentials or – if you've subscribed to feeds using custom credentials – use your own.

Environment Variables

General (CLI & server)

• JOURNALIST_LOG_LEVEL: The log level, 0 being the lowest, 10 the highest
• JOURNALIST_DB: The PostgreSQL connection string

Server only

• JOURNALIST_SERVER_BINDIP: The IP to bind the server to, default: 0.0.0.0
• JOURNALIST_SERVER_PORT: The port the server should run on, default: 8000
• JOURNALIST_SERVER_REFRESH: The refresh interval (in seconds) at which the server should update subscriptions, default: 0 (disabled)
• JOURNALIST_SERVER_API_FEVER: The Fever API, boolean value, default: true (enabled)
• JOURNALIST_SERVER_API_GREADER: The Google Reader API, boolean value, default: false (disabled) NOT YET AVAILABLE

Deployment

Docker

Official images are available on Docker Hub at mrusme/journalist and can be pulled using the following command:

docker pull mrusme/journalist

GitHub release versions are available as Docker image tags (e.g. 0.0.1). The latest image tag contains the latest code of the main branch, while the develop tag contains the latest code of the develop branch.

It's possible to build journalist locally as a Docker container like this:

docker build -t journalist:latest . 

It can then be run using the following command:

docker run -it --rm --name journalist \
  -e JOURNALIST_LOG_LEVEL=10 \
  -e JOURNALIST_DB="postgres://postgres:[email protected]:5432/journalist" \
  -p 0.0.0.0:8000:8000 \
  journalist:latest

DigitalOcean App Platform

You can use the following App Spec to deploy journalist for as little as $12 per month on DigitalOcean's App Platform. Simply fork this repo into your GitHub account, connect that with DO and replace $$ACCOUNT$$ with your account's name in the App Spec:

databases:
- engine: PG
  name: journalist
  num_nodes: 1
  size: db-s-dev-database
  version: "12"
name: journalist
region: nyc
services:
- dockerfile_path: Dockerfile
  envs:
  - key: JOURNALIST_DB
    scope: RUN_TIME
    value: ${journalist.DATABASE_URL}
  github:
    branch: main
    deploy_on_push: true
    repo: $$ACCOUNT$$/journalist
  http_port: 8000
  instance_count: 1
  instance_size_slug: basic-xxs
  name: journalist
  routes:
  - path: /