feedigest

feedigest is a headless RSS/Atom feed aggregator that sends feed updates as a single digest email.

It was written as a simpler alternative to feed2email.

A free, hosted service is also available at https://feedigest.email

As a gem from RubyGems:

gem install feedigest

If the above command fails, make sure the following system packages are installed. For Debian/Ubuntu, issue as root:

apt-get install build-essential patch ruby-dev zlib1g-dev liblzma-dev

feedigest is configured through a YAML configuration file (located under ~/.feedigest/config.yaml by default):

The following configuration options are supported:

• entry_window (default: 24) the maximum age, in hours, of entries to include in the digest
• email_sender (default: feedigest@hostname) the "from" address in the email
• email_recipient (required) the email address to send the email to

feedigest uses SMTP to send emails (Mailgun has a free plan). The relevant configuration options are:

• smtp_address (required) SMTP service address to connect to
• smtp_port (default: 587) SMTP service port to connect to
• smtp_username (required) username of your email account
• smtp_password (required) password of your email account
• smtp_auth (default: plain) controls authentication method (can also be login or cram_md5)
• smtp_starttls (default: true) controls use of STARTTLS

Here's a sample config file:

email_recipient: me@mydomain.com
email_sender: feedigest@mydomain.com
smtp_address: smtp.mailgun.org
smtp_username: postmaster@mydomain.com
smtp_password: 'mypassword'

Finally, you will need a line-separated list of feed URLs:

$ cat > ~/.feedigest/feeds.txt
https://github.com/agorf/feedigest/commits.atom
https://github.com/agorf.atom
...
^D

Note: ^D stands for pressing Ctrl-D.

feedigest --feeds ~/.feedigest/feeds.txt

You can run this with cron e.g. once per day at 10 am:

0 10 * * * feedigest --feeds ~/.feedigest/feeds.txt

Alternatively, you can have feedigest simply print the generated email so that you can send it yourself e.g. by piping it to sendmail:

feedigest --dry-run --feeds ~/.feedigest/feeds.txt | sendmail

It is also possible to have each feed filtered with a custom command. For example, the following script fixes a feed's entry publication dates that use Greek month names and don't follow the required RFC822 format:

require 'nokogiri'

feed_data = $stdin.read
doc = Nokogiri.XML(feed_data)

case feed_data
when /advendure\.com/
  doc.css('pubDate').each do |pubdate|
    %w[
      Ιαν Φεβ Μαρ Απρ Μαι Ιουν Ιουλ Αυγ Σεπ Οκτ Νοβ Δεκ
      Δε Τρ Τε Πε Πα Σα Κυ
    ].zip(
      %w[
        Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec
        Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa Su
      ]
    ).each do |greek, latin|
      pubdate.content = pubdate.content.sub(greek, latin)
    end
  end

  print doc
else
  print feed_data # Do nothing
end

The script reads the feed XML from its standard input (stdin) and writes the modified XML to its standard output (stdout). To use it as a filter, you simply pass as a command-line argument the necessary command to run it:

feedigest --feeds ~/.feedigest/feeds.txt --filter 'ruby /path/to/filter.rb'

It is also possible to specify the path to the YAML configuration file with --config:

feedigest --feeds ~/.feedigest/feeds.txt --config ~/.config/feedigest.yaml

You can issue feedigest -h to get some help text on the supported options.

MIT

Angelos Orfanakos