sfeed_mastodon

Mirror Atom/RSS feeds to Mastodon (& friends) simply and UNIX-ly.
Mastodon-based front-end for the sfeed feed-reader.

Usage

sfeed_mastodon takes output from the lovely feed-aggregator sfeed and posts it to the fediverse.
It could be considered a front-end for sfeed.

You can use it to post an entire RSS feed like so:

$ FEDI_AUTH="yourAuthTokenHere"
$ sfeed https://planet.gnu.org/rss20.xml | sfeed_mastodon https://yourServer.here

If you want to regularly update and mirror a feed — making it act like a normal RSS-repost bot — you can run it like so (after some configuration):

$ FEDI_AUTH="yourAuthorizationTokenHere"
$ sfeed_update ~/.config/sfeedrc
$ cat ~/.config/sfeed/* | sfeed_mastodon https://yourServer.here

It’s that simple. It’s safe to run these commands several times in a row — feed entries that have already been posted won’t be reposted, if you use our docs/sfeedrc.example as your sfeedrc.

For proper automation, you can simply put these commands in a shell script and run it regularly. Such a script has been provided, and is described below — mirror_feed.sh.

Installation

First, make sure to install sfeed.

If Guix is your package manager:

$ guix install sfeed

Now, put ./sfeed_mastodon into your $PATH, somewhere. Assuming ~/.local/bin/…

$ cp sfeed_mastodon ~/.local/bin/

You’ve done it!

Configuration

sfeed

If you want to regularly update an RSS/Atom feed and post only new entries, we need to do some configuration for sfeed_update. For this, we’ve gotta create a config file and feed directory. You should use the docs/sfeedrc.example file in this repo as a base for your own config file.

$ mkdir ~/.config/sfeed/
$ cp docs/sfeedrc.example ~/.config/sfeedrc

You need to edit the example sfeedrc to add in your own Atom/RSS feeds, or to change the feed path. You can read up more on sfeed’s configuration in its man-page¸ sfeedrc(5).

Warning: If you don’t use the provided sfeedrc.example as a base for your configuration, you will probably end up reposting old entries — our sfeedrc.example only keeps the newest ones in the file to avoid this. So please, use sfeedrc.example.

Mastodon

Now, we need to find our authorization token for use with sfeed_mastodon.

To find your authorization token, you can snoop through request headers in Firefox or Chromium by navigating to Developer Tools (F12) → Network → Headers. Refresh your Mastodon page and examine a request, looking for a header like so:

Authorization: Bearer $FEDI_AUTH

… where $FEDI_AUTH is your token. Copy it!

Whenever you use sfeed_mastodon, make sure that this token is stored in the environment variable $FEDI_AUTH, or pass it with the -a parameter.

mirror_feed

To automatically mirror an Atom/RSS feed, you can make a script that runs sfeed_update & sfeed_mastodon, and then put it in your crontab. docs/mirror_feed.sh is a script which does exactly this.

To use mirror_feed.sh with the ~/.config/sfeedrc from our prior configuration:

$ mirror_feed.sh ~/.config/

mirror_feed.sh has an additional config file: sfeedenv. It is a simple shell script that exports two variables: $FEDI_SERVER and $FEDI_AUTH. It will be sourced by mirror_feed.sh, though you can optionally set these variables in the environment instead.

Barring that, mirror_feed.sh expects a directory containing sfeedrc and a subdirectory sfeed/ for posts — just like the configuration in ~/.config discussed earlier.

Formatting

You might want to know about the template parameter (-t) — this lets you tweak the output for sfeed_mastodon as you wish. With this, you can add specific hash-tags to your posts, for example. Its argument should be HTML with some variables within {{double-cramps}} for post data.

Here is an example, the default value:

<b>{{title}}</b><br>
{{url}}<br>
<br>
<blockquote>{{desc_short}}</blockquote>

Short and sweet, right?

Here are the variables you can use:

• title
• url
• desc
• desc_short

Misc.

Author: @jadedctrl:jam.xwx.moe
Source: https://notabug.org/jadedctrl/sfeed_mastodon
License: GPLv3