GitHub Notifications RSS

This is a small service that turns your GitHub notifications into an RSS feed.

You give it a GitHub personal access token.
It calls the /notifications API, filters the data, and serves an RSS 2.0 feed that your reader can subscribe to.

What it does

• Fetches GitHub notifications using the official API
• Can limit to threads where you are actually involved (participating_only)
• Can filter by reason (mention, assign, state_change, ci_activity, ...)
• Can include or exclude specific repositories
• Caches results for a short time so it does not hammer the GitHub API
• Exposes two endpoints:
  • /feed for the RSS feed
  • /health for a simple JSON status

Descriptions can be HTML or plain text, depending on config.

Example feed item

In a typical RSS reader a single item might look like this:

Title

[timkicker/podliner] Fix MPV logging path on Linux

Body

[mention] [Pull request] 🔔
Fix MPV logging path on Linux

Repo: timkicker/podliner
Reason: mention
Type: Pull request
Unread: yes
Repo link: https://github.com/timkicker/podliner
Updated: 2025-11-14T06:56:00+00:00

Quick start with Docker

Clone the repo and copy the example env file:

cp .env.example .env

Edit .env and set at least:

GITHUB_TOKEN=ghp_your_token_here

Then build and start:

docker compose up --build -d

If your compose file maps port 8083:8000, the feed is available at:

• Feed: http://localhost:8083/feed
• Health: http://localhost:8083/health

Add http://localhost:8083/feed to your RSS reader and you are done.

Token and scopes

You need a GitHub Personal Access Token (classic).

• Only public repositories:
  • public_repo and read:user are usually enough
• With private repositories:
  • include repo

Basic configuration

Most options are set through environment variables. There is a .env.example with all of them. The most useful ones:

# GitHub access
GITHUB_TOKEN=ghp_your_token_here
GITHUB_API_URL=https://api.github.com

# Query behaviour
GITHUB_NOTIF_PARTICIPATING_ONLY=true
GITHUB_NOTIF_INCLUDE_READ=false

# Optional filters
GITHUB_NOTIF_REASONS_INCLUDE=
GITHUB_NOTIF_REASONS_EXCLUDE=subscribed,ci_activity
GITHUB_NOTIF_REPOS_INCLUDE=
GITHUB_NOTIF_REPOS_EXCLUDE=

# RSS output
RSS_TITLE=GitHub notifications RSS
RSS_LINK=https://github.com/notifications
RSS_DESCRIPTION=Custom feed built from your GitHub notifications
RSS_HTML_DESCRIPTION=true

# Cache
CACHE_TTL_SECONDS=60

# Server
BIND_ADDR=0.0.0.0
BIND_PORT=8000

You can adjust this later when you know what kind of notifications you want to see or hide. For many setups the defaults should be fine.

Status endpoint

The /health endpoint returns a small JSON payload, for example:

{
  "status": "ok",
  "last_fetch": "2025-11-14T06:56:00+00:00",
  "last_error": null,
  "cache_ttl_seconds": 60
}

• ok means the last fetch worked
• degraded means GitHub failed but an older cached feed is still served
• error means there is no valid cache and the last fetch failed

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License. See LICENSE for details.