Fresh RSS Cleaner

A command line tool to mark as read FreshRSS feeds and categories, based on time.

🎯 Motivation

I use FreshRSS extensively as my main source of News.

For some particular sources, like newspapers, those feeds can get outdated quickly. While Fresh RSS has some options to manage the archival of older feeds, I couldn´t get it to work exactly as I would like, which is simply mark as read articles older than a particular time, configurable by Feed or Category.

That´s when I decided to build this simply tool and run it on schedule to cleanup my FreshRSS instance.

Getting Started

Pre-Requisites

• FreshRSS instance with API Access Enabled.
  • To enable your API access, go to https://myfreshrss.com/i/?c=user&a=profile and set a password in the field External access via API.
  • You will need this password and your username, to authenticate in the FreshRSS API.

Installation

This tool is packaged as a single binary, so the simplest way is to download the latest Release.

Alternatively, a Docker image is also provided.

Usage

Generate a config file

A freshrss-cleaner.yaml file is required in order to configure the rules for your feeds.

You can use the freshrss-cleaner create-config command to create a basic config file in your User Config directory. (Ex: On linux ~/.config/freshrss-cleaner.yaml`).

Alternatively, you can pass the --config file when running the tool.

freshrss-cleaner clean --config="/path/to/my/config/yaml"

The config file should contain the following:

url: "https://myinstance.com/api/greader.php"
username: "<freshrss_username"
password: "<freshrss_password_or_api_key>"
feeds:
  - id: "feed/22"
    days: 2
  - id: "user/-/label/DevOps"
    days: 5

The config file support environment variables substitution. For example, if you want to set your credentials from envrionment variables, you can set the following in your config:

url: env("FRESHRSS_URL")
username: env("FRESHRSS_USER")
password: env("FRESHRSS_PASSWORD")

Configure your feed cleanup rules

On your feeds array, you can configure the feeds that will be processed.

• id this is the id of the feed or category.
• days the number of days, to delete old feeds. (older than specified days)

For the id field, you can use any format supported by the FreshRSS API.

For a specific feed, open the feed on your FreshRSS instance. You will see an URL like https://myinstance/i/?get=f_248. The id to use is the 248 (without the f)

For entire categories or tags, you can use an expression like user/-/label/DevOps as ID. this will process articles from the category DevOps independent of the feed. You can check the logic behind FreshRSS API at: https://github.com/FreshRSS/FreshRSS/blob/d0b961131939800a119801bfce7411ad2e429e9e/p/api/greader.php#L939

🤝 Contributing

Check CONTRIBUTING.md files for details.

🫶 Support

If you find this project helpful and would like to support its development, there are a few ways you can contribute:

📃 License

Distributed under the MIT License. See LICENSE file for details.

📩 Contact

✉️ Email - oss@brunopaz.dev

🖇️ Source code: https://github.com/brpaz/freshrss-cleaner