rsspull downloads and parses RSS and Atom feeds, converts posts into email messages, and stores them in Maildirs. This way you can read your feeds using an email client (I use claws, so I can access mailing lists, newsgroups and feeds all in one application). The heavy lifting is performed by the awesome feedparser library.
rsspull requires at least Python 3.3. You can install it from PyPI like this:
$ pip install ws.rsspullYou need to create a configuration file in ~/.rsspull/config, like:
[global]
target = ~/Maildir/rss
target_type = maildir
logfile = ~/.rsspull/log
workers = 1
user_agent = optional custom headerFor low-volume applications you can also send the emails via SMTP instead:
[global]
target = test@example.com
target_type = smtp://my-smtp-server.example.comList the feeds you want to pull in an OPML file at ~/.rsspull/feeds.opml:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<opml version="1.1">
<head>
<title>feeds.opml</title>
<ownerName>rsspull</ownerName>
<ownerEmail>rsspull@localhost</ownerEmail>
</head>
<body>
<outline text="tech">
<outline text="ongoing" xmlUrl="http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/ongoing.atom" />
</outline>
<outline text="general">
<outline text="heisec" xmlUrl="http://www.heise.de/security/news/news.rdf" />
<outline text="trac_example" xmlUrl="https://example.com/trac/timeline?milestone=on&ticket=on&changeset=on&wiki=on&max=10&daysback=90&format=rss" auth="user:password"/>
</outline>
</body>
</opml>Notes about the format:
- You can group your feeds (using nested
<outlines>), this does not matter to rsspull. - The
textattribute is used as the folder name, relative to themaildirsetting in~/.rsspull/config. If you run rsspull on an IMAP server, you can create folder hierarchies by using something liketext=".rss.tech.ongoing"(check you IMAP server documentation how it represents folder hierarchies. The example with dots works for Courier, others might use actual subfolders, and so on). - Basic authentication is supported with the
authattribute. - You can use
file://URLs.
Then simply run:
$ rsspullto download the feeds.
You can pass rsspull --confdir /path/to/config to use a different location than ~/.rsspull.
- Uses
If-Modified-SinceHTTP headers to avoid downloading a feed that has not changed. Addds a
Content-Locationheader to each message that contains the URL of that post. I bound the following script to [return] in claws to open the current entry in a webbrowser:#!/bin/bash URL=`sed -ne '/^Content-Location/s/.*: //p' $1 | head -n 1` if [ -n "$URL" ]; then mozilla $URL &> /dev/null fi- Entries are converted to multipart messages, one with the original HTML and one converted into markdown-like plaintext (via html2text), so most of the time opening in a browser isn't even necessary since you can read the post right in the email client.
- Can use several worker threads to download and parse feeds to increase performance, since quite some time is spent waiting for downloads to complete (the
workerssetting in~/.rsspull/config). - Has been in daily usage since 2007, so it definitely Works For Me(tm).