Web2RSS

A feed generator, that keeps tabs on web sites (or JSON feeds or other things reachable by HTTP) and generates an Atom feed with entries for every time the site has been noticed to change.

This is Alpha quality software that seems to work for me, but is missing a ton of features (see the TODO) and future updates will break database compatibility and do Bad Things™.

Installation

• Install a MySQL compatible server and client libraries (for example MariaDB)
• Install the Haskell Tool Stack
• Clone this repository and in the root directory run

$ stack setup && stack build

How to run locally

• To run locally from the source directory

$ stack exec web2rss-exe

How to run on a server (in ~production)

• Copy the file web2rss-exe in an architecture dependent subdirectory under .stack-work/install to the machine where you want to run it. The target machine needs to have the MySQL libraries installed, but other than that the requirements are minimal.
• To run e.g., behind Nginx, the following works (under an existing server setup with whatever TLS or other things)

proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:PORT/;

• To run behind Nginx on a non-root path

location /web2rss {
  rewrite /web2rss/(.*) /$1 break;
  rewrite ^/web2rss$ /web2rss/ permanent;
  proxy_pass  http://127.0.0.1:PORT/;
  proxy_redirect / /web2rss/;
}

• For running under Systemd the following unit file (place it at /usr/lib/systemd/system/web2rss.service)

[Unit]
Description=Web2RSS

[Service]
EnvironmentFile=-/PATH-TO/web2rssenv
Type=simple
ExecStart=/PATH-TO/web2rss-exe
Restart=on-abort

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

with a related web2rssenv file, e.g.,

USER="web2rss"
PASSWORD=""
DB="web2rss"
PORT=""
SOURCE_CODE_URL=""

To start up, issue

# systemctl start web2rss.service

How to configure

For the time being, Web2RSS is configured using environment variables. Understood variables are:

• USER for database username
• DB for database name
• PASSWORD for database password
• PORT for port to listen on
• SOURCE_CODE_URL for a link to finding your customized version

Contributing

Contributions are welcome and I will try my best to answer quickly to all suggestions. If you start working on something mentioned in the TODO, let me know so I don't scoop you.

License

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

Aknowledgements

I thank my employer Futurice for providing monetary sponsorship for this work through the Spice Program