Stringer

A self-hosted, anti-social RSS reader.

Stringer has no external dependencies, no social recommendations/sharing, and no fancy machine learning algorithms.

But it does have keyboard shortcuts and was made with love!

Installation

Stringer is a Ruby app based on Sinatra, ActiveRecord, PostgreSQL, Backbone.js and DelayedJob.

Stringer will run just fine on the Heroku free plan.

Instructions are provided for deploying to Heroku manually, to any Ruby compatible Linux-based VPS, to Docker and to OpenShift.

Niceties

Keyboard Shortcuts

You can access the keyboard shortcuts when using the app by hitting ?.

Using your own domain with Heroku

You can run Stringer at http://reader.yourdomain.com using a CNAME.

If you are on Heroku:

heroku domains:add reader.yourdomain.com

Go to your registrar and add a CNAME:

Record: CNAME
Name: reader
Target: your-heroku-instance.herokuapp.com

Wait a few minutes for changes to propagate.

Fever API

Stringer implements a clone of Fever's API so it can be used with any mobile client that supports Fever.

Use the following settings:

Server: {path-to-stringer}/fever (e.g. http://reader.example.com/fever)

Email: stringer (case-sensitive)
Password: {your-stringer-password}

If you have previously setup Stringer, you will need to migrate your database and run rake change_password for the API key to be setup properly.

Translations

Stringer has been translated to several other languages. Your language can be set with the LOCALE environment variable.

To set your locale on Heroku, run heroku config:set LOCALE=en.

If you would like to translate Stringer to your preferred language, please use LocaleApp.

Clean up old read stories on Heroku

If you are on the Heroku free plan, there is a 10k row limit so you will eventually run out of space.

You can clean up old stories by running: rake cleanup_old_stories

By default, this removes read stories that are more than 30 days old (that are not starred). You can either run this manually or add it as a scheduled task.

Development

Run the Ruby tests with rspec.

Run the Javascript tests with rake test_js and then open a browser to http://localhost:4567/test.

Getting Started

To get started using Stringer for development you first need to install foreman.

gem install foreman

Then run the following commands.

bundle install
rake db:migrate
foreman start

The application will be running on port 5000.

You can launch an interactive console (a la rails c) using racksh.

Acknowledgments

Most of the heavy-lifting is done by feedjira and feedbag.

General sexiness courtesy of Twitter Bootstrap and Flat UI.

Contact

If you have a question, feature idea, or are running into problems, our preferred method of contact is to open an issue on GitHub. This allows multiple people to weigh in, and we can keep everything in one place. Thanks!

Maintainers

Robert Fletcher boon.gl

Alumni

Matt Swanson (creator), mdswanson.com, @_swanson Victor Koronen, victor.koronen.se, @victorkoronen

btzs/stringer