Hosting web-based feed readers on the Rasp Pi

Installing the Reader Software

You can determine the IP address of your Rasp Pi on your LAN by calling ifconfig. Subsequently, you can execute the installation assistant of Tiny Tiny RSS by pointing a web browser on any computer attached to your LAN to the URL http://<RaspPi-IP>/tt-rss/install/. Fill in the displayed form with information about your MySQL server analogous to the information shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2: The installation assistant of your new web feed reader.

After clicking on Test configuration, the message Test succeeded will appear. Next, you can click on the newly added button Initialize database, which causes the software to create all required tables and associated structures inside the MySQL database. This step takes only a brief moment, and a few seconds later the button Save configuration is available for selection. Click on the button to finish the installation.

First Login

You can invoke the feed reader itself via http://<RaspPi-IP>/tt-rss/. For the first login, a standard user account exists with user name admin and password password. At this point, you should replace the admin password with your own (Figure 3). To do so, click on Actions at the top right of the overview screen for Tiny Tiny RSS (Figure 4) and choose Preferences from the submenu that appears. In the Users tab of the Preferences menu, you can do more than just change passwords. Here, you can also set up accounts with restricted user rights for other family members so that they have their own access to the feed reader without being able to modify very important options.

Figure 3: You should change the password for the admin account immediately after your first login.

Figure 4: The overview screen shows the latest news feeds, as well as various menu entries.

Your Raspberry Pi still needs to refresh automatically and at regular intervals the news feeds to which you have subscribed. The easiest way to accomplish this is by installing a cron job. To do so, open up the cron editor and add the following line via sudo crontab -e:

*/30 * * * * /usr/bin/php5 /var/www/tt-rss/update.php --feeds --quiet

This command will execute the accompanying update.php script approximately every 30 minutes.