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RSSAlchemy is a website-to-rss converter, like RSSHub, RSS-bridge or Rss.app. Here are main features:

• Convert arbitrary website to RSS feed using CSS selectors
• Dynamic websites are supported using headless chrome (playwright)
• Cookies¹ (supports scraping private feeds, eg youtube subscriptions)
• Proxy
• Results caching
• Adblock (primarily for loading speedup)
• Screenshots (primarily for debugging)
• Presets for sharing configurations
• Stateless² (all task parameters are encoded into url, no database needed)
• Distruibuted by design (deploy as many workers as you need)
• Self-hosted; easy to deploy; docker-compose provided
• Relatively small codebase, written in go + typescript
• Security and reliability:
  • Rate-limit by source client IP
  • Rate-limit by target domain (to prevent 429 if many tasks target the same site)
  • Block service workers
  • Prevent WebRTC leak if using proxy
  • Block localhost and private IPs (including proxy server's internal services)
  • Chrome is sandboxed; container is UNprivileged

feature/program	RSS Alchemy	RSS Hub	RSS-Bridge	RSS.app
Custom websites	✅ (using CSS selectors)	❌ (only hardcoded site list)	✅ (using CSS selectors)	✅
Render dynamic sites	✅ (using headless chrome)	❌	❌	✅
Hosting	Self-hosting	Self-hosting	Self-hosting	Only cloud
Price	Free and open-source	Free and open-source	Free and open-source	Paid ($8/mon)

Demo instance

rssalchemy.efprojects.com

Deployment

git clone https://github.com/egor3f/rssalchemy
cd rssalchemy/deploy
docker-compose up -d

Then open your browser targeting to port 8080.

For SSL, authentication, domains, etc. - use Caddy or Nginx (no specific configuration required). Personally I recommend Caddy, if you haven't used it before - give it a try :)

Configuration

Configuration is done using environment variables

You can see all available options in config.go file (struct Config)

Docker-compose deployment uses deploy/.env file

Scaling

Each worker can process 1 page at a time, so to scale you should run multiple worker instances. This is done using replicas parameter in worker section in docker-compose.yml file

Troubleshooting FAQ

Q: My RSS software shows timeout error, but rssalchemy logs are ok
A: Increase timeout. For miniflux it's HTTP_CLIENT_TIMEOUT, for other clients - read their documentation

Development

You need

• Go 1.23 (most of application)
• Node.js 20 (frontend)
• Nats (with jetstream)
• Redis

Instaling dependencies example for MacOS:

brew install go@1.23
brew install node@20
brew install redis
brew install nats-server  # Don't use brew services to manage nats because it lacks config support
go mod download
cd frontend/wizard-vue && npm install
nats -js

Also this repository contains some useful git hooks. To enable them, use:

git config --local core.hooksPath .githooks/

Footnotes

1. Cookies require support from your RSS reader/aggregator. Miniflux works, others are not checked yet. ↩

2. Nats KV is used to store cookies permanently, it's required for sites that update cookies on every request, like youtube ↩