rss

A news feed aggregator that can be deployed on AWS for near $0 for personal use.

static web app hosted on S3
HTTP API hosted on Lambda
periodic polling of RSS/Atom news feeds
state stored in DynamoDB
PWA with LocalStorage to store state on the client side

How it works

How to deploy

Pre-requisites

An AWS account
A secret access key and access key ID to deploy infrastructure (follow the Security Credentials link in your account)
Terraform
The AWS CLI tool installed on your machine.
NodeJS and npm

Step 1 - Clone repo

git clone https://github.com/glynnbird/rss.git
cd rss

Step 2 - Define constants

In the terraform directory, create a file called terraform.tfvars with the following data

API_KEY = "<create a random string>"

Step 3 - Create Infrastructure

In the root of the project type:

cd lambda
npm install
cd ../terraform
terraform init
terraform apply --auto-approve
terraform output -json > ../frontend/config.json

This will deploy the s3 buckets, lambda function and databases required by the project. It will then copy some variables needed by the frontend into the frontend directory.

Step 4 - Generate the static website files

In the frontend directory type:

npm ci
npm run generate

Step 5 - Deploy website to S3

Still in the frontend directory, inspect the config.json file, locate the s3Bucket object and make a note of the value field. Then in the terminal type:

aws s3 sync dist/ "s3://<s3Bucket_value>"
# e.g. aws s3 sync dist/ "s3://d7rndzct013phmlp2vww"

Step 6 - Visit your website!

Inspect the config.json file again and locate the applicationURL object. It will be something like: http://d7rndzct013phmlp2vww.s3-website-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/

Visit that URL! The first time you visit, you'll need to provide the API key that you created in Step 2. Now you can add feeds and enjoy your articles!

NOTE: The RSS feeds are refreshed every 5 minutes. Be patient!