Usage

Basic usage

Start by displaying the help message to check that tinyfeed is correctly installed

tinyfeed --help

Then this is how you use tinyfeed in its most basic form:

tinyfeed --output "index.html" https://lovergne.dev/rss

This tell tinyfeed to fetch the feed at https://lovergne.dev/rss, generate a webpage for it and output the result to index.html. The value of --output can be a relative or absolute path.

You can then open the resulting index.html in your browser using the file scheme with an URL like file:///absolute/page/to/your/index.html. Or, on most OS, you can right-click on the index.html in your file explorer and use "Open With" and select your browser.

If you want to process multiple feeds, you can pass multiple URLs to tinyfeed:

tinyfeed --output "index.html" https://lovergne.dev/rss https://blog.codingconfessions.com/feed

Or use an input file containing all of your feeds (preferable if you have many):

tinyfeed --input feeds.txt --output index.html

Example of feeds.txt file:

# Software Engineering
https://lovergne.dev/rss.xml

# Cyber Security
https://words.filippo.io/rss/
https://feeds.feedburner.com/TroyHunt

# Frontend
https://tonsky.me/atom.xml
https://andy-bell.co.uk/feed.xml
https://www.htmhell.dev/feed.xml

Notice that lines starting with # are comments and won't be parsed by tinyfeed.

Docker caveat

If you are running tinyfeed through Docker, you should be aware of the following details:

• Files for the --input and --output flags won't be available if you don't mount them.
• You will not be able to use pipelining if you don't use Docker's -i flag (interactive mode).

Single feed without mount:

docker run -i thebigroomxxl/tinyfeed https://lovergne.dev/rss > index.html

Multiple feeds from a file without mount:

cat feeds.txt | docker run -i thebigroomxxl/tinyfeed > index.html

For more guidance, check out the Docker section of the documentation.

Configuration

You can change the default behavior of tinyfeed and customize its settings using flags:

Flags:
  -D, --daemon               Whether to execute the program in a daemon mode.
  -d, --description string   Add a description after the name of your page
  -h, --help                 help for tinyfeed
  -i, --input string         Path to a file with a list of feeds.
  -I, --interval int         Duration in minutes between execution. Ignored if not in daemon mode. (default 1440)
  -l, --limit int            How many articles to display (default 256)
  -n, --name string          Title of the page. (default "Feed")
  -o, --output string        Path to a file to save the output to.
  -q, --quiet                Add this flag to silence warnings.
  -r, --requests int         How many simulaneous requests can be made (default 16)
  -s, --stylesheet string    Link to an external CSS stylesheet
  -t, --template string      Path to a custom HTML+Go template file.
  -T, --timeout int          timeout to get feeds in seconds (default 15)

Most flags are used to change default values, but more advanced flags like --daemon, --stylesheet and --template have their own dedicated documentation page:

• Understanding daemon mode
• Custom theme with styling
• Custom layout with templating

Hosting the tinyfeed webpage

tinyfeed is only a static site generator (even if it's a one-page website) so once you are happy with the page you generated you will need a way to host it and a way to update it.

For the hosting, the solution is an HTTP server like NGINX or Caddy. If you are unfamiliar with HTTP servers, I would recommend Caddy because it is simpler to configure and handles HTTPS for you automatically.

For the updating, you will have a lot of options and this will depend on your setup. For guidance on that subject, the workflow section of the documentation presents 5 options:

• Cron: running tinyfeed periodically in a cron job. This is the simplest setup.
• Docker: running tinyfeed as a containerized service. This is a good option if you are already familiar with Docker.
• systemd and OpenRC: running tinyfeed as a service managed by your init system. This is the traditional (and dependencies-free) way to integrate a daemon with your OS.
• GitHub Action and Page: run tinyfeed the serverless and free (as in free beer) way. Use GitHub Action to periodically generate your page like a cron job and GitHub Page to replace a traditional HTTP server.