FeedHQ

FeedHQ is a simple, lightweight web-based feed reader. Main features:

User-facing features

• RSS and ATOM support
• Grouping by categories
• Awesome pagination and intelligent browsing
• Great readability on all screen sizes (smatphones, tablets and desktops)
• Mobile-first, retina-ready
• Reading list management with Instapaper, Readability or Read It Later support
• Filter out already read entries
• Hides images/media by default (and therefore filters ads and tracking stuff)
• Multiple user support
• OPML import
• Syntax highlighting, awesome for reading tech blogs
• Keyboard navigation
• Subtome support

Developer- / Sysadmin-facing features

• Nice with web servers, uses ETag and Last-Modified HTTP headers
• Handles HTTP status codes nicely (permanent redirects, gone, not-modified…)
• Exponential backoff support
• PubSubHubbub support

Installation

Requirements:

• Python 3.4 or greater
• Redis (2.6+ recommended)
• PostgreSQL (9.2+ recommended but anything >= 8.4 should work)
• Elasticsearch (see compatibility table below)

Getting the code:

git clone https://github.com/feedhq/feedhq.git
cd feedhq
virtualenv -p python2 env
source env/bin/activate
add2virtualenv .
pip install -r requirements.txt

Elasticsearch version requirements:

Configuration

FeedHQ relies on environment variables for its configuration. The required environment variables are:

• DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE: set it to feedhq.settings.
• SECRET_KEY: set to a long random string.
• ALLOWED_HOSTS: space-separated list of hosts which serve the web app. E.g. www.feedhq.org feedhq.org.
• FROM_EMAIL: the email address that sends automated emails (password lost, etc.). E.g. FeedHQ <feedhq@example.com>.
• REDIS_URL: a URL for configuring redis. E.g. redis://localhost:6354/1.
• DATABASE_URL: a heroku-like database URL. E.g. postgres://user:password@host:port/database.

Optionally you can customize:

• DEBUG: set it to a non-empty value to enable the Django debug mode.
• MEDIA_ROOT: the absolute location where media files (user-generated) are stored. This must be a public directory on your webserver available under MEDIA_URL.
• MEDIA_URL: the URL that handles media files (user-generated) served from MEDIA_ROOT. By default, it is set to /media/.
• STATIC_ROOT: the absolute location where static files (CSS/JS files) are stored. This must be a public directory on your webserver available under the /static/ URL.
• STATIC_URL: the URL that serves static files (CSS/JS files) located in STATIC_ROOT. By default, it is set to /static/.
• SENTRY_DSN: a DSN to enable Sentry error reporting.
• SESSION_COOKIE_PATH: the path set on the session cookie. E.g., /.
• HTTPS: set-it to a non-empty value to configure FeedHQ for SSL access.
• EMAIL_URL: a URL for configuring email. E.g. smtp://user:password@host:port/?backend=my.EmailBackend&use_tls=true. The backend querystring parameter sets the Django EMAIL_BACKEND setting. By default emails only go to the development console.
• ES_NODES: space-separated list of elasticsearch nodes to use for cluster discovery. Defaults to localhost:9200.
• ES_INDEX: the name of the elasticsearch index. Defaults to feedhq.
• ES_ALIAS_TEMPLATE: string template to format the per-user alias that is created in elasticsearch. Defaults to feedhq-{0}.
• ES_SHARDS: number of shards that you want in your elasticsearch index. This cannot be changed once you have created the index. Defaults to 5.
• ES_REPLICAS: number of times you want your shards to be replicated on the elasticsearch cluster. Defaults to 1. Set it to 0 if you only have one node. This is only used at index creation but the index setting can be altered dynamically.
• HEALTH_SECRET: a shared secret between your FeedHQ server(s) and your monitoring. The /health/ endpoint can be protected by requiring clients to provide a shared secret in an X-Token header. If no secret is set, the health endpoint is open to all.
• LOG_SYSLOG: set it to 1 to send logs to /dev/log instead of stdout (the default). Logs are formatted in JSON.

For integration with external services:

• READITLATER_API_KEY: your Pocket API key.
• INSTAPAPER_CONSUMER_KEY, INSTAPAPER_CONSUMER_SECRET: your Instapaper API keys.
• READABILITY_CONSUMER_KEY, READABILITY_CONSUMER_SECRET: your Readability API keys.

Then deploy the Django app using the recipe that fits your installation. More documentation on the Django deployment guide. The WSGI application is located at feedhq.wsgi.application.

To create the Elasticsearch index:

django-admin.py create_index

Then you'll need to create the appropriate PostgreSQL database and run:

django-admin.py syncdb
django-admin.py migrate

Note that additionally to the web server, you need to run one or more consumers for the task queue. This is done with the rqworker management command:

django-admin.py rqworker store high default low favicons

The arguments are queue names.

Once your application is deployed (you've run django-admin.py syncdb to create the database tables, django-admin.py migrate to run the initial migrations and django-admin.py collectstatic to collect your static files), you can add users to the application. On the admin interface, add as many users as you want. Then add some some categories and feeds to your account using the regular interface.

Crawl for updates:

django-admin.py sync_scheduler
django-admin.py updatefeeds

Set up a cron job to update your feeds on a regular basis. This puts the oldest-updated feeds in the update queue:

*/5 * * * * /path/to/env/django-admin.py updatefeeds

The updatefeeds command puts 1/12th of the feeds in the update queue. Feeds won't update if they've been updated in the past 60 minutes, so the 5-minute period for cron jobs distributes nicely the updates along the 1-hour period.

A cron job should also be set up for picking and updating favicons (the --all switch processes existing favicons in case they have changed, which you should probably do every month or so):

@monthly /path/to/env/bin/django-admin.py favicons --all

Here is a full list of management commands that you should schedule:

• add_missing creates the missing denormalized URLs for crawling. Since URLs are denormalized it's recommended to run it every now and then to ensure consistency.

  Recommended frequency: hourly.

  Resource consumption: negligible (2 database queries).

• delete_unsubscribed is the delete counterpart of add_missing.

  Recommended frequency: hourly.

  Resource consumption: negligible (2 database queries).

• favicons --all forces fetching the favicons for all existing URLs. It's useful for picking up new favicons when they're updated. Depending on your volume of data, this can be resource-intensive.

  Recommended frequency: monthly.

  Resource consumption: the command itself only triggers async jobs but the jobs perform network I/O, HTML parsing, disk I/O and database queries.

• updatefeeds picks 1/12th of the URLs and fetches them.

  Recommended frequency: every 5 minutes.

  Resource consumption: the command itself only triggers async jobs but the jobs perform network I/O, HTML parsing and -- when updates are found -- database queries.

• sync_scheduler adds missing URLs to the scheduler. Also useful to run every now and then.

  Recommended frequency: every hour.

  Resource consumption: one large database query per chunk of 10k feeds which aren't in the scheduler, plus one redis HMSET per URL that's not in the scheduler. As a routine task it's not resource-intensive.

• sync_pubsubhubbub unsubscribes from unneeded PubSubHubbub subscriptions.

  Recommended frequency: once a day.

  Resource consumption: low.

• clean_rq removes stale RQ jobs.

  Recommended frequency: once a day.

  Resource consumption: low. Only makes requests to Redis.

• delete_old removes expired entries as determined by each user's entry TTL.

  Recommended frequency: once a day.

  Resource consumption: medium, makes delete_by_query queries to ES (1 per user).

• delete_expired_tokens removes expired API tokens. Tokens are valid for 7 days, after which they are renewed by client apps.

  Recommended frequency: once a day.

  Resource consumption: low (one DELETE query).

Development

Install the development requirements:

pip install -r requirements-dev.txt

Run the tests:

make test

Or if you want to run the tests with django-admin.py directly, make sure you use feedhq.test_settings as the DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE environment variable to avoid making network calls while running the tests.

The Django debug toolbar is enabled when the DEBUG environment variable is true and the django-debug-toolbar package is installed.

Foreman is used in development to start a lightweight Django server and run RQ workers. Environment variables are managed using a python port of Daemontools' envdir utility. A running Redis server is required for this workflow:

make run

When running django-admin.py updatefeeds on your development machine, make sure you have the DEBUG environment variable present to avoid making PubSubHubbub subscription requests without any valid callback URL.

Environment variables for development are set in the envdir directory. For tests, they are located in the tests/envdir directory.

When working on frontend assets (SCSS or js files), watchman can be used to automatically run compass and uglify on file changes. Install watchman, Compass (gem install bundle && bundle install) and npm (part of nodejs) to get started. Then run:

make watch

Once you're done working with assets, simply kill watchman:

pkill watchman