Saturday, August 15, 2015

Build a Yahoo Pipes replacement with Tiny Tiny RSS on Ubuntu 14.04

TT-RSS is an open source Yahoo Pipes (and to a large part, Google Reader) replacement. You can filter feeds, import OPML files and access via APIs and Android. It also has plugin support.

I'm going to list the steps to install Tiny Tiny RSS on a clean install of Ubuntu 14.04 using Apache, PostgreSQL, GIT and PHP5.

For demonstration purposes I'm not including the best security practices (SSL, firewall, fail2ban, user permission best practices, etc). Please refer to this great guide to secure your installation.

From a clean Ubuntu 14.04LTS install the following packages:
apt-get update && apt-get install -y apache2 git ntp postgresql-contrib php5 php5-curl php5-cli php5-pgsql

Make sure your hostname is set and update the Apache config to prevent FQDN error messages.
echo "ServerName $HOSTNAME" >> /etc/apache2/apache2.conf

Also, since timing is important with RSS feeds, we installed the NTP service.
service ntp reload

We are going to recycle the standard html output rather than create a virtualhost for demonstration purposes so we will git clone into the generic Apache directory.
git clone https://tt-rss.org/git/tt-rss.git /var/www/tt-rss
mv /var/www/html /var/www/html2 && mv /var/www/tt-rss /var/www/html

Now we are going to create a PostgresSQL user and database. Make sure you enter your own, unique username and password (and document it).
su - postgres
createuser -P -s -e ttpguser

It will prompt you to create a password for the ttpguser (or whichever username you chose).
Now we will create the database
createdb ttrssdb
exit

After you exit, you should be back as root. We need to modify the PostgreSQL client authentication conf file: /etc/postgresql/9.3/main/pg_hba.conf (Use nano if you are more comfortable with it.) and add the user we created in the database.

After this line:
local   all             postgres                                peer
Add this entry (make sure that it's the same username you created earlier):
local   all             ttpguser                                   md5

Update permissions for the cache and various other elements
chmod -R 777 /var/www/html/cache/images
chmod -R 777 /var/www/html/cache/upload
chmod -R 777 /var/www/html/cache/export
chmod -R 777 /var/www/html/cache/js
chmod -R 777 /var/www/html/feed-icons
chmod -R 777 /var/www/html/lock

Restart the services
service postgresql restart && service apache2 restart

Browse to the IP address of the server you created and you will be directed to http://<yourIP>/install if everything went alright.
Enter the following parameters
Username ttpguser
DB name ttrssdb
Hostname (leave blank)
Port 5432

Once that's done, initialize the database. You will get some code you will need to copy and import into your root www directory.
vi /var/www/html/config.php

Paste the code in and save the file. Go back to the root site, http://<yourip> and you should be welcomed with a login screen. The default username and password are admin and password.

To change this, go to Actions -> Preferences -> Users -> Admin -> Change password -> Fill out email (for some reason, cant change password for admin without entering an email address) -> Save -> (Refresh the browser)
Log back in as the admin and the new password. Head back to the user section. Add a new user and create a username you wish to use. Click on it again and enter the password.

You should be able to log in with the non-admin user.

To add a feed, go to Actions -> Subscribe to feed. You will notice the feed does not update. There are multiple ways to update, check the main site for more information on setting cron jobs, etc. For testing, we can simple type
su -c "php /var/www/html/update_daemon2.php" -s /bin/sh www-data&

This will start scrolling text, and will continue to run in the background. If you end the process, the updates will stop. Read the main tt-rss page on updating for more information.

You should see feeds start to appear. You can also import your OPML file now.

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