Self Hosting

A Self Hosted Twitter Like RSS Reader From the Developer of BookStack

RSS is a simple, self hosted RSS reader with a twitter like design. 📰

Jeremy

Feb 22, 2023 — 3 min read

If you are looking for a simple, effective and aesthetically pleasing RSS reader to self host, check out the new... well RSS is what it's called!

The creator of our favorite self hosted wiki app BookStack, has created the RSS reader as a side project. The developer, Dan Brown stated in a Reddit comment earlier this week.

Built this for my own usage, as break from BookStack work to exercise some development skills using some new technologies. Thought it might be useful to others so have tried to formalize it a little with usage instructions and provide it in a neatly-wrapped single container.

It's pretty simple and limited, built without any access control and web-side config editing, so you can just expose it and view it as read-only site if you want.

What is RSS?

A simple, opinionated, RSS feed aggregator.

Features

The following features are built into the application:

Supports RSS and ATOM formats.
Regular auto-fetching of RSS feeds.
Every hour by default, configurable down to 5 mins.
Custom feed names and colors.
Feed-based tags for categorization.
3 different post layout modes (card, list, compact).
Fetching of page open-graph images.
Feeds managed via a single plaintext file.
System-based dark/light theme.
Post title/description search.
Ready-to-use docker image.
Mobile screen compatible.

Install RSS with Docker Compose

A pre-built docker image is available to run the application. Storage data is confined to a single /app/storage directory for easy volume mounting. Port 80 is exposed by default for application access. This application does not support HTTPS, for that you should instead use a proxy layer such as nginx.

version: "2"
services:
    rss:
        image: ghcr.io/ssddanbrown/rss:latest
        container_name: rss
        environment:
            - APP_NAME=RSS
            - APP_FEED_UPDATE_FREQUENCY=35
            - APP_LOAD_POST_THUMBNAILS=true
        volumes:
            - /docker/rss-files:/app/storage
        ports:
            - "8093:80"
        restart: unless-stopped

When you launch the RSS container, it will create a file in the volume you set called "feeds.txt" which can easily be edited with FileBrowser. Your feed will remain blank until you add the feed URLs to this file.

You can add these as examples to test it out:

https://noted.lol/rss Noted⭐[#9233B1] #self-hosting
https://www.linuxserver.io/blog.rss Linux-Server[#0078b9] #self-hosting
https://blog.networkprofile.org/rss Network-Profile[#D48D27] #self-hosting

You can customize the feed names, colors and tags from the "feeds.txt" file.

There are 3 different view types you can use. Card, Detailed and Compact. Each are mobile friendly as well.

Final Notes and Thoughts

RSS is a great reader for those needing something quick and simple. However, there are many limitations that some people may not like. Things like no full content from the reader, no user system and no authentication. I don't particularly need to block my RSS feed from others anyway so these few limitations don't bother me.

I will be happily using this app from now on. I love how it looks on mobile and I prefer to read my articles on site versus within the reader because I like to comment and encourage content creators like myself.

If you find RSS useful, be sure to give it a star on the RSS Github repo!