RSS Reader self-hosted with a Raspberry Pi

I use RSS feeds to gather my news. I need to keep up to date with technology for work, but I have always had curiosity in the topic since the 80s.

For a long time, I have been using an app called Reeder on iOS and Mac. It’s excellent, it works across my Apple devices, happily filling up with news everyday. I probably use it at least once a day without any exaggeration. The benefit of Reeder is that it uses iCloud to store and sync news feeds and articles. It works well, but these days, I use Android too. I found a smashing RSS aggregator called Read You, it has a wonderful interface using Material Design. The problem is that iCloud doesn’t work on Android.

I looked into it and there is the option of paying for a service like Feedly or Inoreader. They’re good options, but I’m not keen on monthly charges, especially since iCloud was all included. So I looked for a self-hosted version and very quickly came across FreshRSS. FreshRSS can be installed locally and uses a standard Google Reader API for RSS apps to use. 

Quite why Google ever dropped Google Reader will always be a mystery to me.

Anyway, I found a good tutorial from PiMyLifeUp to install FreshRSS on a Raspberry Pi Zero 2. RSS takes little resources and speed isn’t too important so a Pi Zero was perfect, easily powered off a USB port from my router, happy days.

The tutorial almost worked perfectly, I needed to tweak the PHP step as 8.0 wasn’t available anymore, but it all worked. I was able to export my feeds in an OPML file and import into FreshRSS. Tweaked some settings and Reeder and Read You were happily syncing with the Pi. 

The last step in the equation was being able to download the latest articles away from home, in other words outside my local network. I have done this before with port forwarding, but I wondered if there was a better way.

Once again, PiMyLifeUp came to the rescue with another tutorial using Cloudflare. I host my domain with Cloudflare and they can provide a secure tunnel to the Pi without opening ports. Perfect! I followed the instructions and it worked, I was able to connect to my Pi Reader on 5G. Until I closed my Terminal window and it stopped.

It turns out that the Cloudflare tunnel opens as a foreground task, once you close Terminal, it stops. What you need to do is set up a service to run as a background task. PiMyLifeUp had the steps but I couldn’t get it working. Then I couldn’t the tunnel working and I was quickly despairing I’d even had the idea. The problem with Pi projects like these is that they start working and then break just by looking at them funny. I’ve had this happen so many times, sinking hours and hours into a project before giving up.

However this time, I looked for help and not on forums that end up confusing you even more. That’s the other thing with Pi (or Linux in general) there is a lot of help out there, but somehow it just gets more confusing.

I asked Gemini.

Gemini asked for what I was seeing and offered step by step instructions to fix the problem. I quickly found there was a yml config file that needed some extra spaces, which was good. Eventually we got the tunnel working but not as a background task. What really impressed me is that Gemini kept plugging away at giving my clear advice, step-by-steps and asking for feedback. Like me, it kept saying “well this is weird”, or “this is a head scratcher “, and “we will get there”. In the end we did and it praised me for not giving up, even though it was pretty exhausting and Gemini apologised for taking me in circles to get the fix. 

I think learnt that Gemini can genuinely help in these technical issues. It understood what FreshRSS was, it knew about Raspberry Pi, Cloudflare, tunnels and configuration files that would have been difficult to diagnose. It offered several workarounds and explained its thinking throughout. 

I have a cross platform RSS service that syncs news articles on my favourite apps.