Show HN: I built a tiny-VPS friendly RSS aggregator and reader

by rook1e_dev • 2 years ago

187 48 2 years ago

Hi, folks.

As an RSS user, I tried Inoreader and Feedly, then ended up self-hosting a Miniflux instance on my homelab. A few months ago, I moved to another city and had to shut down my homelab for a long time, so I couldn't access my local miniflux. It was quite inconvenient. I decided to self-host my RSS aggregator on a tiny VPS or PaaS such as fly.io. However, Miniflux requires a PostgreSQL database, which may isn't suitable for a tiny VPS instance.

So I built fusion with Golang and SQLite. It contains basic features such as Group, Bookmark, Search, Automatically feeds sniffing, Import/Export OPML file, etc. It uses about 80MB of Mem and negligible CPU usage (metrics here: https://imgur.com/a/EJIdevn).

Feel free to share your questions and suggestions.

BTW, I also built an online tool to sniff RSS links from a URL. (https://rss-finder.rook1e.com/)

QasimK• 2 years ago

This is what self-hosted software should be. An app, self-contained, (essentially) a single file with minimal dependencies.

Not something so complex that it requires docker. Not something that requires you to install a separate database. Not something that depends on redis and other external services.

I’ve turned down many self-hosted options due to the complexity of the setup and maintenance.

holsta3• 2 years ago

Node 21 with NPM Sveltekit, shadcn-svelte Echo, GORM gofeed

And the documentation literally specifies it requires docker.

How did this become "minimal dependencies"?

bArray2• 2 years ago

Almost guaranteed this doesn't build in ~2 years and you would likely need to know all of those languages to fix it.

eviks• 2 years ago

The docs literally specify it doesn't

"Deploy with a single binary"

rook1e_dev8• 2 years ago

Hi. Just to clarify.

Node 21 with NPM > Sveltekit, shadcn-svelte

The front-end things are used during the build process. You don't need them when deploy.

And the documentation literally specifies it requires docker.

Fusion can be deployed as a *single binary*. Docker is just the recommended way. Maybe we need to make documentation clearer.

generallee5686• 2 years ago

Agreed. Lately I'm coming across self-hosted services that not only require docker, they essentially require a docker-compose file full of many other dependencies.

The other thing that blows my mind is how many of these self-hosted applications require mysql/postgres instead of just using sqlite.

phubbard• 2 years ago

This is awesome! I currently run FreshRSS on a pi5 and this looks like a nice, non-PHP alternative.

beepbooptheory• 2 years ago

Looks really great. I can't tell from the readme, but can this produce its own feed which is the aggregation of the other feeds? That is the feature I always want and don't see too much with apps like this.

rook1e_dev8• 2 years ago

Hi, thanks for the suggestion! Currently it doesn't have that feature.

You can create an issue about it on GitHub so we can evaluate how much it is needed.

pglevy• 2 years ago

I love this idea! As a code hobbyist, I tried to do something like this for DIY podcast aggregation using Jekyll (https://github.com/lowcodelounge/pod-force). Look forward to checking this out to learn more. Thanks for sharing!

skrause• 2 years ago

I can recommend https://github.com/nkanaev/yarr which is also a single Go binary, consumes only 40 MB of RAM and uses SQLite as well.

nedrylandJP• 2 years ago

I've been using Slack /feed (ugh) to get RSS notifications because I want pings from certain feeds. I have not found a different, easy lightweight way to do this.

visil• 2 years ago

Looks cool! I'm currently using Selfoss, which is fine in terms of requirements/maintenance, but if I didn't, I'd probably give this a try!

pacifika• 2 years ago

Does it produce a rss feed itself?

rook1e_dev8• 2 years ago

Currently it doesn't have that feature.

You can create an issue about it on GitHub so we can evaluate how much it is needed.

gcascio• 2 years ago

Cool project! Also it's welcome resource to learn, since I just started learning Go and was trying myself at an RSS reader (https://stille.app).

rsolva• 2 years ago

Looks really nice! Not sure if it is intentional, but "stille" means "silent" in Norwegian :)

Xeoncross2• 2 years ago

Simple, no-fuss self-hosted server software should really be Rust, or Go / C++ if needed.

All three of them allow you embed the UI assets (media, JS, CSS) into the binary and all three work great with key/value stores (badger, leveldb, rocksdb, etc..) or SQLite.

There is no install. No setup. No packages to download first. Just a simple binary that respects OS signals, has crazy good throughput, and uses so little memory that your router can run it.

Please, consider moving your JVM/Node.js/Electron project to one of these as a chance to jump into really performant software.

(There are also a lot of RSS servers written in Rust/Go/C on Github: https://github.com/search?q=rss+host+language%3AGo+language%...)

_lvbh2• 2 years ago

This one is written in Go. The front end in Svelte is built into static files and served by Go. The docker container just makes it easy to build but they do distribute a single static binary

watermelon0• 2 years ago

Node.js / PHP / dotnet / JVM projects can be bundled to a single binary file.

Sure, the binaries are bigger, and they cannot run on routers, but you can easily run many of them simultaneously on RaspberryPi, which is usually the bare minimum HW people use to self-host.

Performance wise, difference should be negligible for most use cases, and allows people to write software in the language that's most suited for them and the project.

Xeoncross2• 2 years ago

Performance wise, difference should be negligible for most use cases

I think you mean unnoticeable (or similar); the difference in performance (memory usage and CPU cycles) is certainly not negligible.

bigiain• 2 years ago

You might have seen this already, but Rachel By The bay has a few recent blog posts on how feed readers commonly get things wrong, and a service she's got to "score" your feed reader based on it's observed behaviour:

https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2024/05/27/feed/

https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2024/05/29/score/

https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2024/05/30/fs/

Don't be "that guy" who releases software that once deployed widely creates "thundering herds" that knock unsuspecting websites down <glares at Mastodon>

djfergus• 2 years ago

Great project. Spun the docker version up on an Oracle always free VPS instance (server class: potato) in a few seconds and it runs great with my imported OPML with a few hundred feeds. As the enshittification of feedly continues I'm keen to find a replacement.

Am I missing the "mark all as read" button? That would be helpful vs going through 13 years of old posts and marking read page by page (albeit quickly at 500 at a time).

rook1e_dev8• 2 years ago

You can custom the page size by params in url ( ?page_size=1000).

But large page size can cause page performance problems.

Show HN: I built a tiny-VPS friendly RSS aggregator and reader

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