No more Google Reader? Try Tiny Tiny RSS!

It's old news now but, in case you've been living under a rock, I should let you know that Google Reader is shutting down. As a result, many users, myself included, have been looking for a solid replacement. I'm happy to report that I think I've found my new home in Tiny-Tiny RSS. After trying out many other alternatives, among them The Old Reader and Feedly I have found that this simple, self-hosted solution really does everything I want. What's more? Did I mention it's Self Hosted!?

At this point you're probably asking yourself, "But Ted, why would I want to go through all the effort of setting up and maintaining my own server just for an RSS reader?". A local RSS reader has it's limitations. Sure, you could copy your reader's config around with you on a flash drive or use a cloud storage solution like Owncloud to move it around your machines, but then you have to figure out what reader works on all of your platforms. A web reader is, generally, a much more flexible route as it, usually, works on all platforms and Tiny-Tiny RSS even has a native Android app. So why not just use a hosted solution like Feedly, TheOldReader or GoogleRea.... oh, right, because these are run companies who have the right to shut down down a product whether you like it or not. By hosting it yourself, you only have to answer to what you want, it doesn't have to shutdown just because the rest of the market would prefer to hear what their neighbor had for breakfast on the insert latest social media/micro-blogging site, you control the site, you control the content, you control it's fate.

I found Tiny-tiny RSS to be extremely easy to set-up. Now, don't say, "But you're a sysadmin, that's not saying very much". Well, I pride myself on trying hard to analyse things from the average user's (or at least average Linux user's) perspective. If you know how what the terminal is, can edit a plain English configuration file and have a spare computer or shared web host just laying around (or even if you don't), Tiny-tiny RSS takes only a few minute to set-up.

The Install

The installation of Tiny-tiny RSS requires that you have a web host running php and mysql or postgres. I've outlined the basic installation procedure below:

1. Download the .tar.gz file from here (as always, make sure you get the latest version).


2. Extract this to your web directory. On most servers this will be /var/www. Make sure your apache user owns this directory, on Ubuntu you can do this with: chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/ttrss


3. Once you've downloaded the files and extracted them to your web directory, you need to tell apache where to look. Since you're going to be logging in to this server, you'll probably want to use HTTPS. It's not necessary but I strongly encourage it. I've copied my server configuration below as an example of how to do an port 80 (http) to port 443 (https) redirect to make your life easier when navigating to your feeds as well as the main apache configuration I used. If you're lucky enough to have a server running Ubuntu or Debian (or other Debian dirivative that uses the /etc/apache2/site-available directory structure) you can just copy paste these two files to /etc/apache2/sites-available and proceed.
   
   /etc/apache2/site-available/yoursite-redirect
   

   
   <VirtualHost feeds.yoursite.com:80>
       RewriteEngine on
       RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} !^443$
       RewriteRule ^/(.*)$ https://%{SERVER_NAME}/$1 [NC,R,L]
   </VirtualHost>
   

   
   /var/apache2/site-available/yoursite
   

   
   <Virtualhost feeds.yoursite.com:443>
       ServerName feeds.yoursite.com
       ServerAdmin admin@feeds.yoursite.com
   
       DocumentRoot /var/www/tt-rss
   
       SSLEngine on
       SSLCertificateFile      /etc/ssl/certs/ssl-cert-snakeoil.pem
       SSLCertificateKeyFile   /etc/ssl/private/ssl-cert-snakeoil.key
   
       <Directory /var/www/tt-rss>
           Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
           AllowOverride None
           Order allow,deny
           allow from all
       </Directory>
   
       ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/feeds_yoursite_error.log
   
       # Possible values include: debug, info, notice, warn, error, crit,
       # alert, emerg.
       LogLevel info
   
       CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/feeds_yoursite_access.log combined
   
       Alias /doc/ "/usr/share/doc/
       <Directory "/usr/share/doc/">
           Options Indexes MultiViews FollowSymLinks
           AllowOverride None
           Order deny,allow
           Deny from all
           Allow from 127.0.0.0/255.0.0.0 ::1/128
       </Directory>
   </VirtualHost>
   

   
   
4. Disable the default apache configuration and enabler your new ones:
   sudo a2dissite 000-default && sudo a2dissite default-ssl
sudo a2ensite yoursite && sudo a2ensite yoursite-redirect


5. Since we're using apache's ssl module along with the apache rewrite module to redirect you to https://, we need to enable two modules:
   
   sudo a2enmod ssl && a2enmod rewrite
   
   enable php as well if not already:
   
   sudo a2enmod php


6. Restart apache:
   
   sudo service apache2 restart


7. Set cronjob for www-data to refresh feeds periodically. To do this run the following command and paste the following line (making changes where appropriate for your site). The example I have given will refresh all feeds, for all users, every 30 minutes.
   
   sudo crontab -u www-data -e

*/30 * * * * cd /var/www/tt-rss && /usr/bin/php /var/www/tt-rss/update.php --feeds >/dev/null 2>&1

That's pretty much it for the install. In addition to the web interface, you can also download the Android app from the marketplace. It's free for the demo and only a few dollars to buy forever. I have used the app for a few days now and have come to like it almost as much, if not more, than I loved the Google Reader app.