Python application which fetches rss-feed and generates a nice static website with high readability from the available feed entries.

Create a virtualenv before you start installing. There do exist lots of tutorials on how to work with virtualenv.

Then run pip install -r requirements.txt to install all needed modules. There are some modules related to crypto which are needed to access TLS secured sites.

Type python app.py -h to get following help:

usage: app.py [-h] [--feedurl FEEDURL] [--output OUTPUT] --readable {YES,NO}

Fetch an RSS-Feed and generate a Webpage from it.

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  --feedurl FEEDURL, -f FEEDURL
                        url of feed to fetch
  --output OUTPUT, -o OUTPUT
                        filename of html to output
  --readable {YES,NO}, -r {YES,NO}
                        add css to make it readable

e.g: python app.py -f https://www.netzpolitik.org/feed -o index.html -r YES

There are three arguments you can provide to the commandline call:

• -f or --feedurl which expects the http/s-url to the rss-feed
  Example: python app.py -f http://www.tagesschau.de/xml/rss2
• -o or --output which expects an absolute or relative path to a filename where to store the static website
  Example: python app.py -o /home/www/mywebsite/htdocs/index.html
• -r or --readable expects a YES or a NO (casesensitive) to render site with readability support or without
  Example: python app.py -r YES will render a page with readability support

Type python app.py -f https://www.hackerspace-bremen.de/feed -o space.html -r NO you will get an output file space.html which contains all the rss feed entries put into this file as a static website without any CSS / style infos.

You can easily set this app up to do some fancy work on a server, e.g. by engaging a crontab entry to execute the app. This would make it easy to setup your own static website for an rss feed wrapped in a nice webpage.

• cron should trigger cron.sh on a regular basis to automate things and this in turn will trigger update_feed.sh. Why this? This helps to separate the script-context which is used for update_feed.sh from the usually used cron-environment which may differ from machien to machine.
• See crontab.txt to have an idea/example of how the crontab entry could look like. Btw you edit the crontab entries on your server usually by entering crontab -e which will edit the important file with vi then you need to add the lines from crontab.txt and change the serverdomain to activate it.
• The entry seen in the example of crontab.txt will trigger a script cron.sh which should be made executable by the cron daemon. So in doubt apply a chmod ug+rx cron.sh to make it available to cron.
• Test all these configured scripts before adding the cron entry by just entering ./cron.sh on the commandline and look what happens.
• For readability to work, you need to copy the following folders into your site directory
  • css
  • js
  • images

Be careful with the paths to files and check the permissions and ownership and groupmembership of files if something fails. Often html-files need the ownership or group membership of www-data e.g. You could also do a tail -f /var/log/syslog to debug if your cronjob posts errors there. In some cases cron also sends local mails via postfix. You could check mails bei entering mail on your UNIX box.