filterable-news-api

mysql/php/codeigniter powered news collector. Feel free to report bugs, suggest features and contribute.

Check filterable-news-ui5 for frontend.

Features

• Developed with CodeIgniter 3 and CodeIgniter RestServer
• Collects news from Google News RSS
• Collects images and excerpts from newsapi.org
• News links parsed with Simple HTML Dom Parser
• Base database migration generated with ci_migrations_generator
• Performance measured with php-xhprof-extension
• News report is retrieved by GET method
• News can be filtered by time frame, category and id

Requirements

• PHP 7.2+
• MySQL 5.1+

Setup

1. Enable Apache mod_rewrite

sudo a2enmod rewrite

2. Set AllowOverride and [for production system] set environment variable

sudo nano /etc/apache2/apache2.conf

Paste this:

<Directory /var/www/api.example.com/public_html/>
    AllowOverride All
    SetEnv CI_ENV production
</Directory>

3. Restart Apache

sudo systemctl restart apache2

4. Create database and grant authorization to db user

mysql -u root -p
CREATE DATABASE dbname DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci;
GRANT ALL ON dbname.* TO 'dbuser'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'password';
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
EXIT;

5. Clone this repo as public_html will be document root

cd /var/www
sudo git clone https://github.com/kkayacan/filterable-news-api.git
sudo mv filterable-news-api api.example.com

6. Install dependencies

cd /var/www/api.example.com/application
sudo su
sudo curl -s https://getcomposer.org/installer | php
exit
sudo php composer.phar install

7. Copy configuration files to environment directory

cd /var/www/api.example.com/application/config
sudo mkdir production
sudo cp config.php production/config.php
sudo cp database.php production/database.php
sudo cp rest.php production/rest.php

8. Set base url and newsapi.org api key in config.php

$config['base_url'] = 'https://api.example.com/';
$config['newsapikey'] = 'xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx';

9. Set database info in database.php

$db['default'] = array(
        'dsn'   => '',
        'hostname' => 'localhost',
        'username' => 'dbuser',
        'password' => 'password',
        'database' => 'dbname',

10. [If frontend is on different origin] Enable CORS in rest.php

$config['check_cors'] = TRUE;

If frontend domain unknown

$config['allow_any_cors_domain'] = TRUE;

If frontend domain known

$config['allowed_cors_origins'] = ['https://example.com', 'https://www.example.com'];

11. Change ownership and permissions

cd /var/www
sudo chown -R ownername:www-data api.example.com  
cd api.example.com  
sudo find . -type f -exec chmod 664 {} +  
sudo find . -type d -exec chmod 775 {} +

12. Launch your browser and execute database migration script

api.example.com/migrate

13. Schedule a cron job to start collecting news, ie every 3 minutes

crontab -e

Paste this

*/3 * * * * /usr/bin/curl --silent https://api.example.com/collect/news >/dev/null 2>&1