Saying “Hello!” to my new FreshRSS server that I set up at home last night.
Drunk Sysadmin gets the job done!
Seriously, I’ve been looking for a Feedly replacement, since Feedly seems hell-bent on adding AI integrations and inserting interpretive links into the text of fetched RSS feed documents. (No. Stop. Don’t do that. Bad dog.) Feedly’s gathering some feces, for sure.
I needed a central server to collect all my feeds and a mobile app to read them. After finding this friendly post by some guy named Neil mentioning FreshRSS server and FeedMe app as his solution, I had to try.
With my sysadmin experience, it took me an evening to set it up. I grabbed the v1.24.1 tarball and unrolled it into /usr/local/share/freshrss, made a symlink of the public ./p/ folder into my Apache webroot, reminded myself how to login to MySQL create a new database and user (with grants), and got FreshRSS up and running after answering the setup questions on the WebUI panel. It took longer to export my OPML feed list from Feedly and import it into FreshRSS (and fix all the broken feeds that the Feedly UI was too opaque to even bring to my notice) than it took to read the HOW-TO and install. Did some config hacking tonight to get the PHP mailer settings right so it could send out verification emails.
Installed the FeedMe app on my Android phone, pointed it to the right self-hosted hostname with my username and API key, and now I can use my own aggregator from anywhere.
This FreshRSS install is piggybacking on my Owncloud server’s VM, using the same Apache server, MySQL server, PHP version, LetsEncrypt certificate, and everything, and the VM doesn’t even notice (2GB ram, 2 cores, 20GB storage). So far, so good.
And I’m almost done with marking previously read articles as read. I’ll get down to my actual new article count soon. But, y’all, I feel good about this.
Can’t believe it’s taken me this long to bother. Life’s too short.