rss-to-homeassistant: A Go repository from joonas-fi

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Pushes RSS feeds into Home Assistant as Markdown, so they can be displayed natively.

For more background, see my blog post.

Prerequisites

Home Assistant
Home Assistant needs to be connected to a MQTT server
This software

Configuration

You need to create config.json:

{
	"mqtt": {
		"address": "127.0.0.1:1883",
		"credentials": {
			"username": "AzureDiamond",
			"password": "hunter2"
		}
	},
	"rss_feeds": [
		{
			"id": "skrolli",
			"url": "https://skrolli.fi/feed/"
		}
	]
}

If you don't use MQTT username/password, you can remove the whole "credentials": {...} section.

How to use

You can run this on any computer as long as it can connect to the same MQTT server that Home Assistant uses.

For example, make a directory /home/<username>/rss-to-homeassistant.

Download a suitable binary there (for Raspberry Pi, use the ARM build, for PCs use the amd64 build).

You can rename the downloaded binary to rss-to-homeassistant.

You've created the configuration file. The directory has these contents:

/home/pi/rss-to-homeassistant
├── config.json
└── rss-to-homeassistant

Test starting it manually. If everything goes well, you should see this message:

$ ./rss-to-homeassistant
2021/03/22 07:45:30 [INFO] skrolli changed

You can stop it with Ctrl + c.

The RSS feed should've just popped into Home Assistant (because we use its autodiscovery mechanism to advertise the feeds):

This means that Home Assistant has the Markdown content of the RSS feed. We're close to the finish line.

Displaying the feed's Markdown content

You need to add a Markdown card, with content that has a dynamic placeholder to display the feed entity's Markdown content:

You're done!

Keep this running across system restarts

If you're on Linux, we have a helper to integrate with systemd:

./rss-to-homeassistant install-as-service
Wrote unit file to /etc/systemd/system/rss-to-homeassistant.service
Run to enable on boot & to start (--)now:
	$ systemctl enable --now rss-to-homeassistant
Verify successful start:
	$ systemctl status rss-to-homeassistant

If you followed the tips the installer gave, this program should automatically start after reboots. Have fun! Enjoy life.

TODO