Implementing Nextcloud News
Context
I am reading a lot more blogs these days, which means I'm also truly back into RSS!
I needed a simple way to read my feeds, so initially I started using Tidings, a RSS reader mobile app for Sailfish OS, which was pulling the feeds directly.
However, I found it not super practical, as quite often I wanted to read those feeds on my laptop, so I needed a different approach.
Nextcloud to the rescue!
I am using Nextcloud, which is an open-source collaboration software, providing files management, groupware and many more features.
So far I was only using it for files management, since I am really happy with Baikal for CalDAV and CardDAV.
When looking at RSS options on Nextcloud, I saw that they had Nextcloud
News, "a RSS/Atom Feed reader App for
Nextcloud", which definitely looked interesting since Nextcloud would act as a
central hub, pulling the feeds, and allowing clients to synchronise against it.
Nextcloud News even provides a web-UI in case you want to read your articles
that way.
Installation and configuration
Installing the app
Very easy to do, it's just a click away, and then you have a new entry in your Nextcloud's top menu items, called (surprisingly) "News".
Adding feeds
Very straightforward, you just enter the feed's URL, and specify in which folder you want this feed to appear, and you're good to go.
This is how it looks like in the web UI:
Fighting with updating feeds
Nextcloud's Cron
So far so good you would think.
I was happy with my setup, but then I realised that the feeds were not updated.
When looking at the documentation, it was mentioned that News had several options:
- Ajax
- Web Cron
- System Cron (default)
In a nutshell, any Nextcloud app, when installed, can use Nextcloud's cron.php file to run regular tasks - in that case, updating the feeds.
For some reason, it didn't work - I tried the 3 options, and even tried manually running the script with e.g.
sudo -u http php80 -f cron.php
but no luck: no output, no log, and since I am running the whole thing on a
Synology, configuring it is a bit painful (YES, I will probably look at other
options, such as FreeNASTrueNAS).
News-updater / Github
When looking at the News app settings, I noticed that it was possible to use a so-called "custom updater", namely Nextcloud News Updater: in a nutshell, a script that ran either locally or remotely using the API, to update News.
I installed it on one of my local servers, setup a cron job, and boom I was ready to go!
Reading the news on other systems
Through Sailfish OS
Since I still wanted to read my news on mobile, I installed Fuoten, which is a client for Nextcloud News - and supports all the features, i.e. not only reading feeds, but also adding feeds, creating folders etc.
See it in action:
Wrap Up
I'm really pleased with this setup: I can read my news on both mobile and laptop, and can even do it while travelling, since I recently replaced my aging, broken OpenVPN by WireGuard (I'll publish an article soon).
The next thing I'm planning to do is to add a proper RSS reader on my FreeBSD laptop - I'll also write about it, but so far I am looking at Newsboat.
Tags: IT, SailfishOS