pictuga
a613acfe7d
continuous-integration/drone/push Build is failing
Details
|
||
---|---|---|
morss | ||
tests | ||
www | ||
.drone.yml | ||
.pylintrc | ||
Dockerfile | ||
LICENSE | ||
README.md | ||
app.json | ||
heroku.yml | ||
main.py | ||
morss-helper | ||
setup.py |
README.md
Morss - Get full-text RSS feeds
Homepage • Upstream source code • Github mirror (for Issues & Pull requests)
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 feeds.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' <meta>
.
You can use this program online for free at 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 different backends (in-memory/sqlite/mysql/redis/diskcache)
- Works as server/cli tool
- Deobfuscate various tracking links
Install
Python package
Simple install (without optional dependencies)
From pip
pip install morss
From git
pip install git+https://git.pictuga.com/pictuga/morss.git
Full installation (including optional dependencies)
From pip
pip install morss[full]
From git
pip install git+https://git.pictuga.com/pictuga/morss.git#egg=morss[full]
The full install includes all the cache backends. Otherwise, only in-memory and sqlite3 caches are available. The full install also includes gunicorn (for more efficient HTTP handling).
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.
Docker
From docker hub
With cli
docker pull pictuga/morss
With docker-compose
services:
app:
image: pictuga/morss
ports:
- '8000:8000'
Build from source
With cli
docker build --tag morss https://git.pictuga.com/pictuga/morss.git --no-cache --pull
With docker-compose
services:
app:
build: https://git.pictuga.com/pictuga/morss.git
image: morss
ports:
- '8000:8000'
Then execute
docker-compose build --no-cache --pull
Cloud providers
One-click deployment:
Providers supporting cloud-init
(AWS, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure), based on Ubuntu:
#cloud-config
packages:
- python3-pip
- python3-wheel
- python3-lxml
- python3-setproctitle
- ca-certificates
write_files:
- path: /etc/environment
append: true
content: |
DEBUG=1
CACHE=diskcache
CACHE_SIZE=1073741824 # 1GiB
- path: /var/lib/cloud/scripts/per-boot/morss.sh
permissions: 744
content: |
#!/bin/sh
/usr/local/bin/morss-helper daemon
runcmd:
- source /etc/environment
- update-ca-certificates
- iptables -I INPUT 6 -m state --state NEW -p tcp --dport ${PORT:-8000} -j ACCEPT
- netfilter-persistent save
- pip install morss[full]
Run
morss will auto-detect what "mode" to use.
Running on/as a server
Set up the server as indicated below, 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, and most probably other clients.
Using Docker
From docker hub
docker run -p 8000:8000 pictuga/morss
From source
docker run -p 8000:8000 morss
With docker-compose
docker-compose up
Using Gunicorn
gunicorn --preload morss
Using uWSGI
Running this command should do:
uwsgi --http :8000 --plugin python --wsgi-file main.py
Using morss' internal HTTP server
Morss can run its own, very basic, HTTP server, meant for debugging mostly. The latter should start when you run morss without any argument, on port 8000. I'd highly recommend you to use gunicorn or something similar for better performance.
morss
You can change the port using environment variables like this PORT=9000 morss
.
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. See below
some tips for the .htaccess
file.
Options -Indexes
ErrorDocument 404 /cgi/main.py
# Turn debug on for all requests
SetEnv DEBUG 1
# Turn debug on for requests with :debug in the url
SetEnvIf Request_URI :debug DEBUG=1
<Files ~ "\.(py|pyc|db|log)$">
deny from all
</Files>
<Files main.py>
allow from all
AddHandler cgi-script .py
Options +ExecCGI
</Files>
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)
If using Docker:
docker run morss --clip http://feeds.bbci.co.uk/news/rss.xml
As a newsreader hook
To use it, the newsreader 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 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:
>>> import morss
>>> xml_string = morss.process('http://feeds.bbci.co.uk/news/rss.xml')
>>> xml_string[:50]
"<?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?>\n<?xml-style"
Using cache and passing arguments:
>>> 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:
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
Arguments and settings
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). How to pass those arguments to morss is explained in Run above.
The list of arguments can be obtained by running morss --help
usage: morss [-h] [--post STRING] [--xpath XPATH]
[--format {rss,json,html,csv}] [--search STRING] [--clip]
[--indent] [--cache] [--force] [--proxy]
[--order {first,last,newest,oldest}] [--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
options:
-h, --help show this help message and exit
--post STRING POST request
--xpath XPATH xpath rule to manually detect the article
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
--order {first,last,newest,oldest}
order in which to process items (which are however NOT
sorted in the output)
--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 HTTP-only options:
callback=NAME
: for JSONP callscors
: allow Cross-origin resource sharing (allows XHR calls from other servers)txt
: changes the http content-type to txt (for faster "view-source:
")
Environment variables
To pass environment variables:
- Docker-cli:
docker run -p 8000:8000 morss --env KEY=value
- docker-compose: add an
environment:
section in the .yml file - Gunicorn/uWSGI/CLI: prepend
KEY=value
before the command - Apache: via the
SetEnv
instruction (see sample.htaccess
provided) - cloud-init: in the
/etc/environment
file
Generic:
DEBUG=1
: to have some feedback from the script execution. Useful for debugging.IGNORE_SSL=1
: to ignore SSL certs when fetch feeds and articlesDELAY
(seconds) sets the browser cache delay, only for HTTP clientsTIMEOUT
(seconds) sets the HTTP timeout when fetching rss feeds and articlesDATA_PATH
: to set custom file location for thewww
folder
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.
Also, if the request takes too long to process, the http request might be discarded. See relevant config for gunicorn or nginx.
MAX_TIME
(seconds) 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
(seconds) 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.
morss uses caching to make loading faster. There are 3 possible cache backends:
(nothing/default)
: a simple python in-memory dict-like 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 withSQLITE_PATH
.CACHE=mysql
: MySQL cache. Connection can be defined with the following environment variables:MYSQL_USER
,MYSQL_PWD
,MYSQL_DB
,MYSQL_HOST
CACHE=redis
: Redis cache. Connection can be defined with the following environment variables:REDIS_HOST
,REDIS_PORT
,REDIS_DB
,REDIS_PWD
CACHE=diskcache
: disk-based cache. Target directory canbe defined withDISKCACHE_DIR
.
To limit the size of the cache:
CACHE_SIZE
sets the target number of items in the cache (further items will be deleted but the cache might be temporarily bigger than that). Defaults to 1k entries. NB. When usingdiskcache
, this is the cache max size in Bytes.CACHE_LIFESPAN
(seconds) sets how often the cache must be trimmed (i.e. cut down to the number of items set inCACHE_SIZE
). Defaults to 1min.
Gunicorn also accepts command line arguments via the GUNICORN_CMD_ARGS
environment variable.
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 readabilite.py
(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.