# Morss - Get full-text RSS feeds _GNU AGPLv3 code_ _Provided logo is CC BY-NC-SA 4.0_ Upstream source code: https://git.pictuga.com/pictuga/morss Github mirror (for Issues & Pull requests): https://github.com/pictuga/morss Homepage: https://morss.it/ This tool's goal is to get full-text RSS feeds out of striped RSS feeds, commonly available on internet. Indeed most newspapers only make a small description available to users in their rss feeds, which makes the RSS feed rather useless. So this tool intends to fix that problem. This tool opens the links from the rss feed, then downloads the full article from the newspaper website and puts it back in the rss feed. Morss also provides additional features, such as: .csv and json export, extended control over output. A strength of morss is its ability to deal with broken feeds, and to replace tracking links with direct links to the actual content. Morss can also generate feeds from html and json files (see `feedify.py`), which for instance makes it possible to get feeds for Facebook or Twitter, using hand-written rules (ie. there's no automatic detection of links to build feeds). Please mind that feeds based on html files may stop working unexpectedly, due to html structure changes on the target website. Additionally morss can detect rss feeds in html pages' ``. You can use this program online for free at **[morss.it](https://morss.it/)**. Some features of morss: - Read RSS/Atom feeds - Create RSS feeds from json/html pages - Export feeds as RSS/JSON/CSV/HTML - Fetch full-text content of feed items - Follow 301/meta redirects - Recover xml feeds with corrupt encoding - Supports gzip-compressed http content - HTTP caching with 3 different backends (in-memory/sqlite/mysql) - Works as server/cli tool - Deobfuscate various tracking links ## Dependencies You do need: - [python](http://www.python.org/) >= 2.6 (python 3 is supported) - [lxml](http://lxml.de/) for xml parsing - [bs4](https://pypi.org/project/bs4/) for badly-formatted html pages - [dateutil](http://labix.org/python-dateutil) to parse feed dates - [chardet](https://pypi.python.org/pypi/chardet) - [six](https://pypi.python.org/pypi/six), a dependency of chardet - pymysql Simplest way to get these: ```shell pip install git+https://git.pictuga.com/pictuga/morss.git@master ``` The dependency `lxml` is fairly long to install (especially on Raspberry Pi, as C code needs to be compiled). If possible on your distribution, try installing it with the system package manager. You may also need: - Apache, with python-cgi support, to run on a server - a fast internet connection ## Arguments morss accepts some arguments, to lightly alter the output of morss. Arguments may need to have a value (usually a string or a number). In the different "Use cases" below is detailed how to pass those arguments to morss. The list of arguments can be obtained by running `morss --help` ``` usage: morss [-h] [--format {rss,json,html,csv}] [--search STRING] [--clip] [--indent] [--cache] [--force] [--proxy] [--newest] [--firstlink] [--resolve] [--items XPATH] [--item_link XPATH] [--item_title XPATH] [--item_content XPATH] [--item_time XPATH] [--nolink] [--noref] [--silent] url Get full-text RSS feeds positional arguments: url feed url optional arguments: -h, --help show this help message and exit output: --format {rss,json,html,csv} output format --search STRING does a basic case-sensitive search in the feed --clip stick the full article content under the original feed content (useful for twitter) --indent returns indented XML or JSON, takes more place, but human-readable action: --cache only take articles from the cache (ie. don't grab new articles' content), so as to save time --force force refetch the rss feed and articles --proxy doesn't fill the articles --newest return the feed items in chronological order (morss ohterwise shows the items by appearing order) --firstlink pull the first article mentioned in the description instead of the default link --resolve replace tracking links with direct links to articles (not compatible with --proxy) custom feeds: --items XPATH (mandatory to activate the custom feeds function) xpath rule to match all the RSS entries --item_link XPATH xpath rule relative to items to point to the entry's link --item_title XPATH entry's title --item_content XPATH entry's content --item_time XPATH entry's date & time (accepts a wide range of time formats) misc: --nolink drop links, but keeps links' inner text --noref drop items' link --silent don't output the final RSS (useless on its own, but can be nice when debugging) GNU AGPLv3 code ``` Further options: - Change what morss does - Environment variable `DEBUG=`: to have some feedback from the script execution. Useful for debugging. On Apache, can be set via the `SetEnv` instruction (see sample `.htaccess` provided). - `callback=NAME`: for JSONP calls - `cors`: allow Cross-origin resource sharing (allows XHR calls from other servers) - `txt`: changes the http content-type to txt (for faster "`view-source:`") ## Use cases morss will auto-detect what "mode" to use. ### Running on a server #### Via mod_cgi/FastCGI with Apache/nginx For this, you'll want to change a bit the architecture of the files, for example into something like this. ``` / ├── cgi │   │ │   ├── main.py │   ├── morss │   │   ├── __init__.py │   │   ├── __main__.py │   │   ├── morss.py │   │   └── ... │   │ │   ├── dateutil │   └── ... │ ├── .htaccess ├── index.html └── ... ``` For this, you need to make sure your host allows python script execution. This method uses HTTP calls to fetch the RSS feeds, which will be handled through `mod_cgi` for example on Apache severs. Please pay attention to `main.py` permissions for it to be executable. Also ensure that the provided `/www/.htaccess` works well with your server. #### Using uWSGI Running this command should do: ```shell uwsgi --http :8080 --plugin python --wsgi-file main.py ``` #### Using Gunicorn ```shell gunicorn --preload morss ``` #### Using docker Build & run ```shell docker build https://git.pictuga.com/pictuga/morss.git -t morss docker run -p 8080:8080 morss ``` With docker-compose: ```yml services: app: build: https://git.pictuga.com/pictuga/morss.git ports: - '8080:8080' ``` Then run ```shell docker-compose up --build ``` #### Using morss' internal HTTP server Morss can run its own, very basic, HTTP server. The latter should start when you run morss without any argument, on port 8080. I'd highly recommend you to use gunicorn or something similar for better performance. ```shell morss ``` You can change the port using environment variables like this `PORT=9000 morss`. #### Passing arguments Then visit: ``` http://PATH/TO/MORSS/[main.py/][:argwithoutvalue[:argwithvalue=value[...]]]/FEEDURL ``` For example: `http://morss.example/:clip/https://twitter.com/pictuga` *(Brackets indicate optional text)* The `main.py` part is only needed if your server doesn't support the Apache redirect rule set in the provided `.htaccess`. Works like a charm with [Tiny Tiny RSS](http://tt-rss.org/redmine/projects/tt-rss/wiki), and most probably other clients. ### As a CLI application Run: ``` morss [--argwithoutvalue] [--argwithvalue=value] [...] FEEDURL ``` For example: `morss --clip http://feeds.bbci.co.uk/news/rss.xml` *(Brackets indicate optional text)* ### As a newsreader hook To use it, the newsreader [Liferea](http://lzone.de/liferea/) is required (unless other newsreaders provide the same kind of feature), since custom scripts can be run on top of the RSS feed, using its [output](http://lzone.de/liferea/scraping.htm) as an RSS feed. To use this script, you have to enable "(Unix) command" in liferea feed settings, and use the command: ``` morss [argwithoutvalue] [argwithvalue=value] [...] FEEDURL ``` For example: `morss http://feeds.bbci.co.uk/news/rss.xml` *(Brackets indicate optional text)* ### As a python library Quickly get a full-text feed: ```python >>> import morss >>> xml_string = morss.process('http://feeds.bbci.co.uk/news/rss.xml') >>> xml_string[:50] "\n>> import morss >>> url = 'http://feeds.bbci.co.uk/news/rss.xml' >>> cache = '/tmp/morss-cache.db' # sqlite cache location >>> options = {'csv':True} >>> xml_string = morss.process(url, cache, options) >>> xml_string[:50] '{"title": "BBC News - Home", "desc": "The latest s' ``` `morss.process` is actually a wrapper around simpler function. It's still possible to call the simpler functions, to have more control on what's happening under the hood. Doing it step-by-step: ```python import morss, morss.crawler url = 'http://newspaper.example/feed.xml' options = morss.Options(csv=True) # arguments morss.crawler.sqlite_default = '/tmp/morss-cache.db' # sqlite cache location url, rss = morss.FeedFetch(url, options) # this only grabs the RSS feed rss = morss.FeedGather(rss, url, options) # this fills the feed and cleans it up output = morss.FeedFormat(rss, options, 'unicode') # formats final feed ``` ## Cache information morss uses caching to make loading faster. There are 3 possible cache backends, which can be picked via environment variables: - `(nothing/default)`: a simple python in-memory dict() object. - `CACHE=sqlite`: sqlite3 cache. Default file location is in-memory (i.e. it will be cleared every time the program is run). Path can be defined with `SQLITE_PATH`. - `CACHE=mysql`: MySQL cache. Connection can be defined with the following environment variables: `MYSQL_USER`, `MYSQL_PWD`, `MYSQL_DB`, `MYSQL_HOST` To limit the siz of the cache: - `CACHE_SIZE` sets the target number of items in the cache (further items will be deleted but the cache migth be temporarily bigger than that). Defaults to 10k entries. - `CACHE_LIFESPAN` sets how often the cache must be trimmed (i.e. cut down to the number of items set in `CACHE_SIZE`). Defaults to 1hr. ## Configuration ### Length limitation When parsing long feeds, with a lot of items (100+), morss might take a lot of time to parse it, or might even run into a memory overflow on some shared hosting plans (limits around 10Mb), in which case you might want to adjust the below settings via environment variables. - `MAX_TIME` sets the maximum amount of time spent *fetching* articles, more time might be spent taking older articles from cache. `-1` for unlimited. - `MAX_ITEM` sets the maximum number of articles to fetch. `-1` for unlimited. More articles will be taken from cache following the nexts settings. - `LIM_TIME` sets the maximum amount of time spent working on the feed (whether or not it's already cached). Articles beyond that limit will be dropped from the feed. `-1` for unlimited. - `LIM_ITEM` sets the maximum number of article checked, limiting both the number of articles fetched and taken from cache. Articles beyond that limit will be dropped from the feed, even if they're cached. `-1` for unlimited. ### Other settings - `DELAY` sets the browser cache delay, only for HTTP clients - `TIMEOUT` sets the HTTP timeout when fetching rss feeds and articles ### Content matching The content of articles is grabbed with our own readability fork. This means that most of the time the right content is matched. However sometimes it fails, therefore some tweaking is required. Most of the time, what has to be done is to add some "rules" in the main script file in *readability* (not in morss). Most of the time when hardly nothing is matched, it means that the main content of the article is made of images, videos, pictures, etc., which readability doesn't detect. Also, readability has some trouble to match content of very small articles. morss will also try to figure out whether the full content is already in place (for those websites which understood the whole point of RSS feeds). However this detection is very simple, and only works if the actual content is put in the "content" section in the feed and not in the "summary" section.