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.

NOTE: this repository is deprecated as it uses a deprecated version of PHP and mimics the deprecated host machine method. We should all migrate to containers.

NOTE/2: this repository is now archived and pointless, as Heroku does not offer a free stuff anymore. Personally, I moved to Fly.io.

Quick start

(TODO: as we're not using submodules anymore, maybe the Heroku button works? Have to check!)

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).

Hey! 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_HEROKU_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_HEROKU_PLUGINS='favicon_badge:https://github.com/ctag/favicon_badge,fever:https://github.com/DigitalDJ/tinytinyrss-fever-plugin#master'

NOTE: this env variable name changed because of a name clash with tt-rss new global configuration (which, by the way, you could use to customize your settings, via Heroku config: heroku config:set TTRSS_SOMETHING=SOMEVALUE).

If you use the legacy variable ~~TTRSS_PLUGINS~~ to install additional plugins, you MUST migrate to the new name: heroku config:set "TTRSS_HEROKU_PLUGINS=$(heroku config:get TTRSS_PLUGINS)" && heroku config:unset TTRSS_PLUGINS.

TT-RSS version

The latest tt-rss version is downloaded from the master branch each time the application starts, so you're always up-to-date.

NOTE: given that dynos don't share disk, this also means that potentially the update dyno and the web dyno run on a different version of tt-rss. In case the database schema is changed, the update dyno will silently update it, which might lead to data loss. In any case... let's all together do backups and hope that everything goes smoothly.

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