Recently I started to blog again, and created a new blog. As a result I wanted to create a companion RSS reader. I used TT-RSS and the following directions about hosting it on Heroku. It does work!

TT-RSS on Heroku

It is possible and it works, even with free dynos!

Thanks Tiny Tiny RSS for your existence, and thanks to Reuben Castelino and Art Chaidarun for pioneering the deploy on Heroku.

If you have issues, feel free to bug report/submit pull request. Depending on spare time I'll look into it.

Quick start

(note: the Deploy to Heroku button doesn't support projects with submodules, so this repo can't be auto-deployed. However, the instructions are pretty simple!)

Supposing you have already a Heroku account and you have the Heroku CLI installed:

# clone this repository
$ git clone https://github.com/serl/ttrss-heroku.git && cd ttrss-heroku

# create the application (names are unique on the platform)
$ heroku create my-fancy-ttrss

# we'll need a database
$ heroku addons:create heroku-postgresql:hobby-dev

# consider adding plugins now, you'll spare some extra builds (see §Adding plugins)

# everything is ready, push! (this will take time)
$ git push heroku master

# and enjoy (default credentials are admin:password; you should change the password immediately)
$ heroku open

Update the feeds

As you'll quickly discover, the feeds are not going to update by themselves.

Solution #1 (recommended)

Use the scheduler addon:

$ heroku addons:create scheduler:standard
$ heroku addons:open scheduler

Then on the web interface that appears, add a new hourly job. The command to run is update.

NOTE: in order to comply the 10k row limit of the free tier, after the update I'm truncating the ttrss_tags table, as I'm not personally using this feature (and it uses a lot of rows).

Solution #2

You could fire worker dyno with the update-daemon command (but think about those juicy dyno hours).

Feed icons are disappearing!

There's a solution! Create an account on Amazon Web Services, a bucket on S3 (names are unique on the platform) and credentials to access to it from IAM. When you have all this, set these variables on the application (change where needed):

$ heroku config:set \
  AWS_REGION=eu-central-1 \
  AWS_S3_BUCKET_NAME=my-fancy-ttrss \
  AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=youraccesskeyid \
  AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=yoursecretaccesskey

Then, if you want the icons to appear, you should force the application to reload them (don't do this if you're updating with Solution #2!):

$ heroku run update-icons
$ heroku restart

Adding plugins

You can add custom plugins by setting the env variable TTRSS_PLUGINS. It should be a comma-separated list of items in the format name:git-repository-url#branch_or_tag (or name:git-repository-url, if the default branch is ok for you).

For example:

$ heroku config:set \
  TTRSS_PLUGINS='favicon_badge:https://github.com/ctag/favicon_badge,fever:https://github.com/DigitalDJ/tinytinyrss-fever-plugin#master'
$ git push -f heroku HEAD~:master && git push heroku master # dirty trick to trigger a rebuild (not needed if you're installing or updating)

Update TT-RSS version

Either you update the submodule in tt-rss, or you wait me to pick the latest commit (and then pull my changes), then update your Heroku application (git push heroku master).

Tips to spare dyno hours

Prefer scheduler over daemon for updates (Solution #1)... Maybe less than once per hour?
Put wisely the update interval for each feed (I mean as loose as possible).
Let the web dyno go to sleep when it's tired (don't keep that tab always open / use The Great Suspender on Chrome).
(unrelated to dyno hours, but still important) As we're in the free tier for the database, we're limited to 10k rows. Check from time to time if you're compliant (Heroku web interface is friendly). If not, consider deleting some feeds.

TODOs

Persist sessions (memcached)?
Email digest support
You name it

lisawilliams/ttrss-heroku