Feedbin in Docker

Self-host Feedbin with Docker. Feedbin is a web based RSS reader. It's an open-source Ruby on Rails software.

Feedbin's main goal is not to be easily self-hostable, and it was quite hard getting all of the services to work. During the process of creating feedbin-docker, I made a few contributions to the upstream project to make it self-hostable ready. Other have taken other approaches by forking it, but all the projects I found on GitHub were abandonned and weren't working anymore.

I chose to run it in Docker because of all the services required to run Feedbin.

Here is a breakdown of all the containers:

web: the puma rails app
workers: some of the sidekiq workers for background processing
refresher: sidekiq worker for refreshing feeds
image: sidekiq worker to find thumbnails
extract: nodejs service to extract article content from full web pages
camo: a node reverse proxy to prevent mixed content
minio: object storage for images, favicons, imports
redis: cache, store sidekiq queues and stats
memcached: cache
postgresql: database
elasticsearch: full text search
caddy: https-enabled reverse proxy

As you can see it's a lot. Technically, you can give up on a few of them without breaking Feedbin:

image: you won't have thumbnails, which is not that important depending on your appearance settings.
camo: your browser will make the requests directly to the websites. Less privacy and risk or mixed content.
elasticsearch: you won't have full text search

You can also replace caddy with another reverse proxy, but caddy is really handy.

Setup

I recommend a server with more than 2 GB of RAM. Otherwise you will likely have OOM kills.

Clone the repo:

git clone https://github.com/angristan/feedbin-docker.git

Copy .env.example to .env and fill ALL the variables
Copy docker-compose-example.yml to docker-compose.yml. If you want to disable a service this is the place.
Copy caddy/example.Caddyfile to caddy/Caddyfile and update the configuration if you need.

Run the database migrations:

docker-compose run --rm feedbin-web rake db:setup

Launch everything:

docker-compose up -d

You can check if everything is going well with docker-compose logs -f or docker-compose ps.

Now go to feedbin.domain.tld and create a new account. You're set!

You can make yourself an admin to manage users and to view the Sidekiq web interface.

To do so, run:

docker-compose exec feedbin-web rake feedbin:make_admin[youremail@domain.tld]

Once you're done, you can prevent new users from registering by modifying Caddy config and uncommenting the respond directive for /signup and /users routes.