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Pierce

Pierce is a simple RSS reader with a UI inspired by the late 90s -- Thunderbird and Outlook, mainly.

image of pierce rss reader

Building

  1. Install dmd and dub.
  2. Run dub build

Installation

Brief instructions

Copy the pierce binary, config, and static/ directory to your server. They need to be in the same directory. Copy the init script to /etc/init.d or write your own.

Install postgresql, apache2, and certbot. Run certbot.

Create the database and database user. Preferably create the user that pierce will run as so you don't have to have a password.

Set up a reverse proxy to localhost:9881.

Done!

Detailed instructions

You need:

  • the pierce binary
  • the static/ directory
  • your pierce config file
  • the init script, pierce.sh
  • postgresql
  • A webserver as a reverse proxy, and the webserver configuration file (optional, highly recommended)
  • letsencrypt client (optional, highly recommended)

Copy the binary, config, and static/ directory to your server using scp (WinSCP is a good Windows scp client). Put them in their own directory.

On Ubuntu, you can install the dependencies with:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:certbot/certbot
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install python-certbot-apache apache2 postgresql-9.5

Copy over the apache config file to /etc/apache2/sites-available/pierce.conf. Ensure that you set the site name is correct for your site. Then enable the site and letsencrypt:

sudo a2ensite pierce
sudo apache2 reload
sudo certbot --apache -d [your site's name here]

Prepare a database and user for pierce. You can access postgres with sudo su postgres and then psql. Inside the psql command line:

create database piercedb;
create user pierce with password 'password';
grant all on database piercedb to pierce;

Make sure the username and password match the config file.

Ctrl+D until you're back at your normal shell.

Copy pierce.sh to the server and move it to the init directory:

sudo cp pierce.sh /etc/init.d/pierce

Now run sudo service pierce start.

You're done!

Configuration

The configuration file is a JSON object such as:

{
  "db": "postgresql://pierceuser:password@dbservername/piercedbname",
  "allowRegistrations": true,
  "port": 9881,
  "mongo": "mongo://mongoservername:27017/pierce"
}

"db" is a postgresql server URL. It defaults to postgresql://localhost/pierce.

"allowRegistrations" controls whether new people can register to use your Pierce installation. It defaults to true.

"port" changes the port that Pierce listens to. The default is 9881.

"mongo" is the location of your mongodb instance, if you are migrating from an older version of Pierce that used MongoDB.

Logging

Pierce does not delete its own log files. This is to allow you to set your own policy for logfile retention. On my server, I used sudo crontab -e to add a cronjob:

@daily find /var/www/pierce/logs -mtime +10 -delete

This deletes any logs older than 10 days.