Carta Straccia is a RSS feed aggregator

Written in D using sumtype, pegged, htmld, requests and Vibe.d

RSS parsing with libmrss.

Features

• Linux only
• Server/client architecture with CLI parameters
• Multi-tasking using Vibe.d's Tasks and the message passing model to concurrently process multiple feeds
• Single-file feeds configuration, with separate, per-feed refresh interval
• Multiple endpoints support: Display the aggregated news in HTML, from the command line (WIP) or edit source/cartastraccia/endpoints.d to add your desired visualization
• HTML endpoint visualization can be customized editing public/css/* and the frontpage's Diet Template in views/index.dt
• RSS parsing and partial validation (WIP) by keeping the tags needed to a minimum: Carta Straccia follows a text-preferred phylosophy and tries to push any other information out of the way by omitting it when possible.

Installation

Dependencies

• DMD, build with Dub

Carta Straccia uses libmrss to parse RSS feeds. It can be installed in the following ways:

• Using your package manager: libmrss can be installed from the main repositories of most of the distros, using the appropriate package manager. Examples:

    - Gentoo/portage: `emerge libmrss`
    - Debian/apt and derivatives: `apt install libmrss`

• From source: If libmrss is not available for your distribution, it can be built and installed from source. See: https://github.com/bakulf/libmrss.

Building

Requires a working D compiler and Dub:

1. clone this repo:

git clone https://github.com/gallafrancesco/cartastraccia.git

1. build:

dub build -b release

You'll find the cartastraccia executable in the root project directory.

Usage

CLI options and sample first usage:

$ cartastraccia --help

-d   --daemon Start daemon
-e --endpoint Endpoints to register [cli]
-f    --feeds File containing feeds to pull [feeds.conf]
-l     --host Bind to this address [localhost]
-p     --port Bind to this port [8080]
-b  --browser Absolute path to browser for HTML rendering [/usr/bin/elinks]
-r   --reload Reload feeds file
-h     --help This help information.

RSS feeds are gathered from a configuration file specified by the option "--feeds=" A feed configuration file should have the following format:

Title refresh-time  url

where refresh time can be expressed in seconds s, minutes m, hours h or days d. You can check out an example feeds.conf file included in the repository.

How does it work (roughly)

Cartastraccia's architecture is composed of a daemon and a client. The client can connect to the daemon and receive data through different endpoints.

Endpoints

Endpoints are interfaces: URL linked to particular visualizations (HTML, CLI). Interfaces are defined in endpoints.d and can be added by chosing a url and editing the D code base.

The Daemon

The daemon parses the feed configuration file, exiting on failure. For every RSS feed a task is invoked to fetch feed data using an HTML GET request on the URL provided in the configuration file. For each endpoint chosen at startup, the server will expose a URL which provides the data. The HTML endpoint works by rendering static HTML files which are saved to the public/ directory. The current style is defined in che css subdirectory. The CLI endpoint can be invoked from the client but is not supported (yet).

The Client

The client is a command-line interface to the daemon. It can connect to a given host and port and display the main feeds page based on the endpoint chosen. HTML will simply invoke a browser (as in elinks http://host:port). The CLI endpoint will display a (sub)set of news fetching data from the daemon.

License

This project is licensed under the terms of the GPLv3 License.

Contributing

Feel free to open issues and PRs. Current TODOs are:

• Work on a comfortable and polished CLI endpoint
• Add enpoints in general (new visualization, curses, improve HTML...)
• Oneshot mode (no daemon, cron support), might be connected to local articles db