rss2hook

RSS2Hook

This project is a self-hosted utility which will make HTTP POST requests to remote web-hooks when new items appear in an RSS feed.

Rational

I have a couple of webhooks in-place already which will take incoming HTTP submissions and "do stuff" with them, for example:

• Posting to my alerting system.
  • Which is called purppura and is pretty neat.
• Posting to IRC.
  • IRC was mattermost before slack before born.

I also have a bunch of RSS feeds that I follow, typically these include github releases of projects. For example my git-host runs gitbucket so I subscribe to the release feed of that, to ensure I'm always up to date:

• https://github.com/gitbucket/gitbucket/releases.atom

Deployment

If you have a working golang setup you should be able to install this application via:

go get -u  github.com/skx/rss2hook
go install github.com/skx/rss2hook

If you prefer you can fetch a binary from our release page. Currently there is only a binary for Linux (amd64) due to the use of cgo in our dependencies.

Setup

There are two parts to the setup:

• Configure the list of feeds and the corresponding hooks to POST to.
• Ensure the program is running.

For the first create a configuration-file like so:

http://example.com/feed.rss = https://webhook.example.com/notify/me

(There is a sample configuration file sample.cfg which will demonstrate this more verbosely.)

You can use your favourite supervision tool to launch the deamon, but you can test interactively like so:

 $ rss2hook -config ./sample.cfg

Sample Webhook Receiver

There is a simple webserver located beneath webhook/ which will listen upon http://localhost:8080, and dump any POST submission to the console.

You can launch it like so:

 cd webhook/
 go run webhook.go

Testing it via curl would look like this:

  $ curl --header "Content-Type: application/json"  \
  --request POST \
  --data '{"username":"blah","password":"blah"}' \
  http://localhost:8080/

The sample.cfg file will POST to this end-point so you can see how things work:

$ rss2hook --config=sample.cfg

Implementation Notes

• By default the server will poll all configured feeds immediately upon startup.
  • It will look for changes every five minutes.
• To ensure items are only announced once state is kept on the filesystem.
  • Beneath the directory ~/.rss2hook/seen/.
• Feed items are submitted to the webhook as JSON.

Feedback?

Turning this into a SaaS project would be interesting. A simple setup would be very straight-forward to implement, however at a larger scale it would get more interesting:

• Assume two people have subscribed to the same feed.
  • But they did so a few days apart.
• That means what is "new" to each of them differs.
  • So you need to keep track of "seen" vs. "new" on a per-user and per-feed basis.

Anyway it would be fun to implement, but I'm not sure there is a decent revenue model out there for it. Especially when you can wire up IFTTT or similar system to do the same thing.

Steve