#rss #watch #atom #monitor

app rss-watch

rss-watch is a command-line rss/atom feed watching utillity

1 unstable release

0.1.0 Mar 1, 2019

#1466 in Database interfaces

BSD-2-Clause

21KB
430 lines

rss-watch

Build Status License Crates.io

rss-watch is a command-line utillity for watching RSS/Atom feeds and executing a script whenever there's a new entry on the given feed.

Data about the entry is passed as environment variables to the script.

Usage

rss-watch creates a SQLite database to keep track of previously seen feeds and entries.

If you don't override the database path using the -d flag, the following default location will be used, depending on your platform.

Platform Path
*nix $XDG_DATA_HOME/rss-watch/database.db
MacOS $HOME/Library/Application Support/rss-watch/database.db
Windows %LOCALAPPDATA%\mkroman\rss-watch\database.db

It's a good idea to run rss-watch with --init the first time you're watching a new feed if you don't want to execute the scripts for all existing entries in the feed.

rss-watch --init -i 6h https://blog.rust-lang.org/feed.xml ./some-script.sh

Will start watching the Rust blog and only run ./some-script.sh when there's a new entry from this point forward, whereas

rss-watch -i 6h https://blog.rust-lang.org/feed.xml ./some-script.sh

Will immediately run ./some-script.sh for each existing entry if this is the first time this feed is being watched.

Examples

Publish a Redis message when there's a new commit

Create the file publish-redis-message.sh with the following contents:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

redis-cli publish some.channel "There's a new commit: ${FEED_LINK}"

Make it executable:

chmod +x ./publish-redis-message.sh

And run rss-watch with

rss-watch -i 1m https://github.com/mkroman/rss-watch/commits/master.atom ./publish-redis-message.sh

And it'll now check for new commits once a minute and publish the commit url to the channel some.channel.

Environment variables

This is a list of the environment variables that can be passed to the script.

Name Description
FEED_URL The URL to the whole feed. __Required__
FEED_GUID The unique ID for the given entry. This is used to distinguish the entry from old ones. __Required__
FEED_LINK Link to the "full story" for this entry. On an Atom entry this will be the first "alternate" link. _Optional_
FEED_TITLE The title of the new entry. _Optional_

Installation

Prerequisites:

  • libsqlite3-dev

rss-watch is currently only available from crates.io or GitHub.

Installing the latest stable version with Cargo

cargo install rss-watch

Installing from git with Cargo

cargo install --git https://github.com/mkroman/rss-watch.git rss-watch

License

This software is licensed under the BSD 2-clause License.

Dependencies

~53MB
~1M SLoC