pnntprss: A Python RSS/Atom -> NNTP gateway

pnntprss is a simple RSS/Atom feed reader. It exposes feeds via NNTP, so you can read them with the NNTP newsreader of your choice (I use Gnus). Each RSS/Atom feed becomes an NNTP group.

pnntprss is written in Python (version 2.6 or 2.7, I haven't ported it to 3.x yet). It uses Mark Pilgrim's wonderful feedparser which takes care of much of the hard work.

pnntprss has a purposefully simple design. It has no dependencies. All feed data is stored in the filesystem, one directory per feed, one file per feed item. This works surprisingly well, even with hundreds or thousands of items in a feed. I have been running pnntprss continuously for many years; I have 60k feed items occupying 400MB of disk space (I only expire high-volume feeds).

Using pnntprss

1. Clone the pnntprss git repo somewhere.

2. Create a directory ~/.pnntprss/groups.

3. Start the NNTP server in the background (assuming that you cloned the pnntprss repo into your ~/work directory):

    python ~/work/pnntprss/nntpserver.py &
   

4. Add the following lines to your crontab (with crontab -e):

    0-59 * * * *    $HOME/pnntprss/update.py
    43 0,6,12,18 * * *      $/work/pnntprss/expire.py
   

   This will run update.py (which gets feeds) every minute and expire.py (which expires feed items) every 6 hours. (Note that update.py won't actually request every feed every minute if you do this; it will only request feeds that haven't been checked for a configurable interval, which defaults to 30 minutes.)

5. Use admin.py to add some feeds:

    ~/work/pnntprss/admin.py -a -u http://david.wragg.org/blog/ org.wragg.david
   

6. Point your NNTP client to localhost:4321