Fiets – Opinionated feed reader (and filter)

Fiets

Fiets is basically just another feeds aggregator tool. It's quite opinionated in terms of its feature set and in terms of implementation style. And even in its name - it doesn't have anything to do with bicycles by the way... ;-)

If you are interested in details, read on. If you just want to dive in, download the current binary and head over to Quickstart.

Features

• Fetch any number of feeds on a regular base and store posts in a unified stream.
• Supports RSS and Atom format.
• Fetch your personal Twitter feed.
• Bookmark posts for later reading.
• Fever API emulation. (As far as needed to make it work with the Reeder app.)
• Extend fiets with custom Java classes:
  • Fetch anything you want (well, where posts can be extracted) from the Internet.
  • Implement filters to drop unwanted posts.
  • Implement views to highlight certain posts.

Quickstart

(As fiets is Java based, you need a working JRE on your path. Any 8+ version should do it.)

If you have an OPML file to import, you should do that first (if not, just skip this step):

java -cp fiets-0.9.jar fiets.opml.ImportOpml <filename.opml>

Next, start fiets :

java -jar fiets-0.9.jar

By default it starts to listen at port 7000. You can choose an alternative port as optional command line parameter.

Fiets provides no means to secure the connection. When deploying it on a public site make sure to run it behind a reverse proxy with authentication and HTTPS!

Database files are created in the current directory, log files below logs .

Fiets immediately starts checking known feeds for updates.

Add feeds

The add-feed bookmarklet on the Feeds page is currently broken and unfortunately there is no form to add feeds, yet.

You can add feeds manually by calling the URL:

http://<host>:<port>/add-feed?url=<feed-url>

<feed-url>
<feed-url>

From Source

If you prefer to build from the current source:

git clone https://github.com/ondy/fiets.git
cd fiets
ant build
java -jar build/result/fiets-0.9.jar

There are also some really barebone bash start and stop scripts for your convenience.

Why?

I wrote Fiets since my favorite aggregator is being discontinued. Of course I could have adopted that tool, but I don't really like implementing in PHP.

Apart of that I have tried several feed aggregators over the years and have always been missing certain features so I took the chance now to implement my own one. And maybe it's also useful for you, so here you are.