Stringer
A self-hosted, anti-social RSS reader.
Stringer has no external dependencies, no social recommendations/sharing, and no fancy machine learning algorithms.
But it does have keyboard shortcuts and was made with love!
Installation
Stringer is a Ruby app based on Rails, PostgreSQL, Hotwire (Turbo and Stimulus) and GoodJob.
Stringer will run just fine on the Eco/Basic Heroku plans.
Instructions are provided for deploying to Heroku manually, to any Ruby compatible Linux-based VPS, to Docker and to OpenShift.
Niceties
Keyboard Shortcuts
You can access the keyboard shortcuts when using the app by hitting ?.
Using your own domain with Heroku
You can run Stringer at http://reader.yourdomain.com using a CNAME.
If you are on Heroku:
heroku domains:add reader.yourdomain.com
Go to your registrar and add a CNAME:
Record: CNAME
Name: reader
Target: your-heroku-instance.herokuapp.com
Wait a few minutes for changes to propagate.
Fever API
Stringer implements a clone of Fever's API so it can be used with any mobile client that supports Fever.
Use the following settings:
Server: {path-to-stringer}/fever (e.g. http://reader.example.com/fever)
Email: stringer (case-sensitive)
Password: {your-stringer-password}
Translations
Stringer has been translated to several other languages. Your language can be set with the LOCALE environment variable.
To set your locale on Heroku, run heroku config:set LOCALE=en.
If you would like to translate Stringer to your preferred language, please use LocaleApp.
Clean up old read stories on Heroku
You can clean up old stories by running: rake cleanup_old_stories
By default, this removes read stories that are more than 30 days old (that are not starred). You can either run this manually or add it as a scheduled task.
Development
Getting Started
You'll need the toolchain versions pinned in .tool-versions (Ruby, Node,
PostgreSQL, and pnpm). With those installed, run:
bin/setup
This installs dependencies, prepares the database, and launches the development
server. The application will be running on port 3000.
On subsequent runs you can start the server directly with bin/dev, which boots
Puma alongside the esbuild watchers for JavaScript and CSS.
You can launch an interactive console (a la rails c) using rake console.
Tests and linting
Run the Ruby tests with bundle exec rspec. Run a single file or example with
bundle exec rspec spec/path/to/file_spec.rb:LINE.
Run the JavaScript tests with pnpm test (Vitest). This also type-checks and
runs ESLint first.
Other checks: bundle exec rubocop (Ruby lint), pnpm eslint (JS lint),
pnpm stylelint (CSS lint), pnpm tscheck (type check), and
bundle exec brakeman (security scan).
Acknowledgments
Most of the heavy-lifting is done by feedjira and feedbag.
General sexiness courtesy of Twitter Bootstrap and Flat UI.
ReenieBeanie Font Copyright © 2010 Typeco ([email protected]). Licensed under SIL Open Font License, 1.1.
Lato Font Copyright © 2010-2011 by tyPoland Lukasz Dziedzic ([email protected]). Licensed under SIL Open Font License, 1.1.
Contact
If you have a question, feature idea, or are running into problems, our preferred method of contact is to open an issue on GitHub. This allows multiple people to weigh in, and we can keep everything in one place. Thanks!
Maintainers
Robert Fletcher boon.gl
Alumni
Matt Swanson (creator), mdswanson.com, @_swanson Victor Koronen, victor.koronen.se, @victorkoronen
