Selfhosting FreshRSS

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(Note: this is part of my ongoing series on cheaply selfhosting)

It’s been a few months since I started down the selfhosting/home server journey. Thanks to Docker, it has been relatively smooth sailing. Today, I have a cheap mini-PC based server that:

  • blocks ads / online trackers on all devices
  • stores and streams media (even for when I’m out of the house)
  • acts as network storage (for our devices to store and share files)
  • serves as a personal RSS/newsreader

The last one is new since my last post and, in the hopes that this helps others exploring what they can selfhost or who maybe have a home server and want to start deploying services, I wanted to share how I set up FreshRSS, a self-hosted RSS reader (on an OpenMediaVault v6 server)

Why a RSS Reader?

Like many who used it, I was a massive Google Reader fan. Until 2013 when it was unceremoniously shut down, it was probably the most important website I used after Gmail.

I experimented with other RSS clients over the years, but found that I did not like most commercial web-based clients (which were focused on serving ads or promoting feeds I was uninterested in) or desktop clients (which were difficult to sync between devices). So, I switched to other alternatives (i.e. Twitter) for a number of years.

FreshRSS

Wanting to return to the simpler days where I could simply follow the content I was interested in, I stumbled on the idea of self-hosting an RSS reader. Looking at the awesome-selfhosted feed reader category, I looked at the different options and chose to go with FreshRSS for a few reasons:

Installation

To install FreshRSS on OpenMediaVault:

  • If you haven’t already, make sure you have OMV Extras and Docker Compose installed (refer to the section Docker and OMV-Extras in my previous post, you’ll want to follow all 10 steps as I refer to different parts of the process throughout this post) and have a static local IP address assigned to your server.
  • Login to your OpenMediaVault web admin panel, and then go to [Services > Compose > Files] in the sidebar. Press the button in the main interface to add a new Docker compose file.

    Under Name put down FreshRSS and under File, adapt the following (making sure the number of spaces are consistent)
    version: "2.1"
    services:
       freshrss:
         container_name: freshrss
         image: lscr.io/linuxserver/freshrss:latest
         ports:
           - <unused port number like 3777>:80
         environment:
           - TZ: 'America/Los_Angeles'
           - PUID=<UID of Docker User>
           - PGID=<GID of Docker User>
         volumes:
           - '<absolute path to shared config folder>/FreshRSS:/config'
         restart: unless-stopped
    You’ll need to replace <UID of Docker User> and <GID of Docker User> with the UID and GID of the Docker user you created (which will be 1000 and 100 if you followed the steps I laid out, see Step 10 in the section “Docker and OMV-Extras” in my initial post)

    I live in the Bay Area so I set the timezone TZ to America/Los_Angeles. You can find yours here.

    Under ports:, make sure to add an unused port number (I went with 3777).

    Replace <absolute path to shared config folder> with the absolute path to the config folder where you want Docker-installed applications to store their configuration information (accessible by going to [Storage > Shared Folders] in the administrative panel).

    Once you’re done, hit Save and you should be returned to your list of Docker compose files for the next step. Notice that the new FreshRSS entry you created has a Down status, showing the container has yet to be initialized.
  • To start your FreshRSS container, click on the new FreshRSS entry and press the (up) button. This will create the container, download any files needed, and run it.

    And that’s it! To prove it worked, go to your-servers-static-ip-address:3777 from a browser that’s on the same network as your server (replacing 3777 if you picked a different port in the configuration above) and you should see the FreshRSS installation page (see below)
  • You can skip this step if you didn’t (as I laid out in my last post) set up Pihole and local DNS / Nginx proxy or if you don’t care about having a user-readable domain name for FreshRSS. But, assuming you do and you followed my instructions, open up WeTTy (which you can do by going to wetty.home in your browser if you followed my instructions or by going to [Services > WeTTY] from OpenMediaVault administrative panel and pressing Open UI button in the main panel) and login as the root user. Run:
    cd /etc/nginx/conf.d
    ls
    Pick out the file you created before for your domains and run
    nano <your file name>.conf
    This opens up the text editor nano with the file you just listed. Use your cursor to go to the very bottom of the file and add the following lines (making sure to use tabs and end each line with a semicolon)
    server {
        listen             80;
        server_name        <rss.home or the domain you'd like to use>;
        location / {
            proxy_pass     http://<your-server-static-ip>:<FreshRSS port number>;
        }
    }
    And then hit Ctrl+X to exit, Y to save, and Enter to overwrite the existing file. Then in the command line run the following to restart Nginx with your new configuration loaded.
    systemctl restart nginx
    Now, if your server sees a request for rss.home (or whichever domain you picked), it will direct them to FreshRSS.

    Login to your Pihole administrative console (you can just go to pi.hole in a browser) and click on [Local DNS > DNS Records] from the sidebar. Under the section called Add a new domain/IP combination, fill out under Domain: the domain you just added above (i.e. rss.home) and next to IP Address: you should add your server’s static IP address. Press the Add button and it will show up below.

    To make sure it all works, enter the domain you just added (rss.home if you went with my default) in a browser and you should see the FreshRSS installation page.
  • Completing installation is easy. Thanks to the use of Docker, all of your PHP and files will be configured accurately so you should be able to proceed with the default options. Unless you’re planning to store millions of articles served to dozens of people, the default option of SQLite as database type should be sufficient in Step 3 (see below)


    This leaves the final task of configuring a username and password (and, again, unless you’re serving this to many users whom you’re worried will hack you, the default authentication method of Web form will work)


    Finally, press Complete installation and you will be taken to the login page:

Advice

Once you’ve logged in with the username and password you just set, the world is your oyster. If you’ve ever used an RSS reader, the interface is pretty straightforward, but the key is to use the Subscription management button in the interface to add RSS feeds and categories as you see fit. FreshRSS will, on a regular basis, look for new content from those feeds and put it in the main interface. You can then step through and stay up to date on the sites that matter to you. There are a lot more features you can learn about from the FreshRSS documentation.

On my end, I’d recommend a few things:

  • How to find the RSS feed for a page — Many (but not all) blog/news pages have RSS feeds. The most reliable way to find it is to right click on the page you’re interested in from your browser and select View source (on Chrome you’d hit Ctrl+U). Hit Ctrl+F to trigger a search and look for rss. If there is an RSS feed, you’ll see something that says "application/rss+xml" and near it will usually be a URL that ends in /rss or /feed or something like that (my blog, for instance, hosted on benjamintseng.com has a feed at benjamintseng.com/rss).
    • Once you open up the feed,
  • Learn the keyboard shortcuts — they’re largely the same as found on Gmail (and the old Google Reader) but they make using this much faster:
    • j to go to the next article
    • k to go to the previous article
    • r to toggle if something is read or not
    • v to open up the original page in a new tab
  • Use the normal view, sorted oldest first — (you do this by tapping the Settings gear in the upper-right of the interface and then selecting Reading under Configuration in the menu). Even though I’ve aggressively curated the feeds I subscribe to, there is a lot of material and the “normal view” allows me to quickly browse headlines to see which ones are more worth my time at a glance. I can also use my mouse to selectively mark somethings as read so I can take a quick Inbox Zero style approach to my feeds. This allows me to think of the j shortcut as “move forward in time” and the k shortcut as “move backwards” and I can use the pulldown menu next to Mark as read button to mark content older than one day / one week as read if I get overwhelmed.
  • Subscribe to good feeds — probably a given, but here are a few I follow to get you started:

I hope this helps you get started!

(If you’re interested in how to setup a home server on OpenMediaVault or how to self-host different services, check out all my posts on the subject)

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