An eventful RSS server setup

Intro

I had an idea this morning. I wanted to read more dev blogs via RSS. And it occurred to me that Obsidian would be a great place to do it! It’s how I organize all the information in my life, and it’s a great reading experience. Plus, Obsidian has an extremely active plugin community, so there’s probably already a solution.

Finding an Obsidian RSS Plugin

Actually, there are currently 3 RSS feed reader plugins for Obsidian. It did take some trial and error to find one I liked, but I settled on RSS Copyist. It didn’t have a lot of bells and whistles, but it worked well on desktop and mobile.

The Mobile Sync Challenge

Then I ran into trouble trying to sync on mobile. I just could not consistently get newly pulled articles to sync to mobile. At first I thought the problem was Obsidian, because I could see the files from the Nextcloud mobile app, and it claimed the folder was set up to auto sync. But after locating Nextcloud’s local folder, I could never get new subfolders to automatically download. The only thing that worked was going into the app, finding the new folder, and telling it to sync that folder. That’s lame! I can’t do that every time a new folder gets created on my desktop!

Investigating Nextcloud Issues

Then it was off to Nextcloud’s Github issues to see if there were other people reporting issues. And turns out there were tons of people. One dev said the issue was fixed in v1.31, but the version on the Google Play Store was 1.28. But that post was last spring (currently the first week of January). The version I’m running is 1.30.

Setting Up FreshRSS

Since the RSS reader in Obsidian wasn’t that great anyway, I decided to attempt deploying FreshRSS on my home server. That was a struggle, too! But not terrible. It took some time to figure out what both the FreshRSS and Portainer docs couldn’t convey to me. I could have pasted a few lines of yaml into the Portainer UI. But, as usual, I decided to complicate things a bit more and start a git repo for my FreshRSS configuration. So I had to deal with using a Github PAT from Portainer (which apparently can only handle Github “classic” tokens, not the newer ones).

Final Configuration Challenges

Anyway, eventually I realized FreshRSS uses SQLite by default, so I didn’t need to set up a database. Oh, and using environment variables from a .env file in the repo would just 👏 not 👏 work! So I think I just uploaded the file via the UI and called it a day. After that, it deployed the stack. But I’m pretty sure it just used it’s defaults, because I just had to go back and expose a port via the compose file. I’m actually not sure how people follow the examples and docs. I guess I will have to experiment further and maybe write up a detailed post.