Gator

Gator — a simple, fast RSS aggregator and feed-fetcher written in Go.

gator is designed to fetch, parse, and store RSS/Atom feeds so you can build feed-based applications, personal readers, or micro-services that need a reliable feed ingestion pipeline.

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Features

• Fetch and parse RSS / Atom feeds.
• Store feed metadata and items (compatible with PostgreSQL).
• Background fetching with configurable intervals and backoff.
• Simple CLI for common tasks (add-feed, fetch-now, list-feeds).
• REST API to serve stored posts (optional, configurable).
• Designed to be small, testable and production-ready.

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Table of Contents

• Quick start
• Prerequisites
• Configuration
• Usage

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Quick start

# clone
git clone https://github.com/flyingbrain/gator.git
cd gator

# build
go build

# run (example)
export DATABASE_URL=postgres://postgres:postgres@localhost:5432/gator?sslmode=disable
./gator

The examples assume a PostgreSQL database — adjust DATABASE_URL for your environment.

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Prerequisites

• Go 1.20+ (or the version specified in go.mod).
• PostgreSQL (recommended) or any DB supported by the project (see docs).

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Configuration

Gator reads configuration from environment variables and CLI flags. The most important variables:

• DATABASE_URL — connection string for your database (required for persistence).
• FETCH_INTERVAL — default interval (in minutes) between background fetches for feeds.

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Usage

CLI

Gator includes a small CLI to manage feeds and trigger fetches manually.

login name
register name
reset
users
agg
addfeed "name" "url"
feeds
follow url
following 
unfollow url
browse n(count)