Evaggelos Balaskas - System Engineer

Google Reader was -of general acceptance- the best RSS feed reader.
Yahoo had it’s own “perfect” project to parse feeds: Yahoo! Pipes

What did both projects have in common?

They both were cloud projects
that are now discontinued
cause their companies could not profit from them !!!

FreshRSS

So a lot of people started to look up on self-hosted RSS readers to overcome this issue.
Below are my notes on FreshRSS , a free, self-hostable aggregator…

First, download the latest version of FreshRSS:

Download and Setup

# wget -c https://github.com/FreshRSS/FreshRSS/archive/master.zip

# unzip master.zip 

# mv FreshRSS-master/ FreshRSS

# chown -R apache:apache FreshRSS

apache

Create a new Virtual Host on apache and use Let’s Encrypt to create a new SSL certificate:

< VirtualHost *:443 >

    ServerName  FreshRSS.example.com

    # SSL Support
    SSLEngine on

    SSLProtocol ALL -SSLv2 -SSLv3
    SSLHonorCipherOrder on
    SSLCipherSuite HIGH:!aNULL:!MD5

    SSLCertificateFile /etc/letsencrypt/live/FreshRSS.example.com/cert.pem
    SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/letsencrypt/live/FreshRSS.example.com/privkey.pem
    SSLCertificateChainFile /etc/letsencrypt/live/FreshRSS.example.com/chain.pem

    # Logs
    CustomLog logs/FreshRSS.access.log combined
    ErrorLog  logs/FreshRSS.error.log

    DocumentRoot /var/www/html/FreshRSS/

    < Directory /var/www/html/FreshRSS/ >
            Order allow,deny
            Allow from all
    < /Directory >

< /VirtualHost >

reload your apache and after that, open your browser to begin the installation process.

Installation

SQLite Backend

I prefer to use SQLite for my backend self-hosted projects, cause the backup process is a lot easier than with mysql.

At this point you have a fresh FreshRSS installation (self-hosted) on your server!
If you just want to use it through your browser, you are done.

OPML

If you already have a OPML (Outline Processor Markup Language) file with your rss/atom feeds, then you can upload it (import) through the Subscription Manager:

Feeds - Automated Updates

So conclude our FreshRSS setup, we need to automate the update of our feeds. To do that, we just need to add a cron script.

# vim /etc/crontab

*/15 * * * * apache /usr/bin/php /var/www/html/FreshRSS//app/actualize_script.php &> /tmp/fresh.log

EasyRSS

What about your android device (smart phone or tablet) ?

You can use EasyRSS !
Just install it from Fdroid and run it:

FreshRSS - API

To use EasyRSS with FreshRSS, you need to enable the API support from FreshRSS.
The EasyRSS then, will use the api through a token, so to keep things simple enough, we will also change our password to the token ID.

So go to Settings —> Authentication and enable:

    Allow API access (required for mobile apps)

Then go to Settings –> Profile and change your password too:

After that, you can now type your settings on your EasyRSS app:

https://freshrss.example.com/p/api/greader.php