rss-watch

rss-watch is a command-line utillity for watching RSS/Atom feeds and executing a script whenever there's a new entry on the given feed.

Data about the entry is passed as environment variables to the script.

Usage

rss-watch creates a SQLite database to keep track of previously seen feeds and entries.

If you don't override the database path using the -d flag, the following default location will be used, depending on your platform.

Platform | Path ---------|----- *nix | $XDGDATAHOME/rss-watch/database.db MacOS | $HOME/Library/Application Support/rss-watch/database.db Windows | %LOCALAPPDATA%\mkromanrss-watch\database.db

It's a good idea to run rss-watch with --init the first time you're watching a new feed if you don't want to execute the scripts for all existing entries in the feed.

rss-watch --init -i 6h https://blog.rust-lang.org/feed.xml ./some-script.sh

Will start watching the Rust blog and only run ./some-script.sh when there's a new entry from this point forward, whereas

rss-watch -i 6h https://blog.rust-lang.org/feed.xml ./some-script.sh

Will immediately run ./some-script.sh for each existing entry if this is the first time this feed is being watched.

Examples

Publish a Redis message when there's a new commit

Create the file publish-redis-message.sh with the following contents:

```bash

!/usr/bin/env bash

redis-cli publish some.channel "There's a new commit: ${FEED_LINK}" ```

Make it executable:

chmod +x ./publish-redis-message.sh

And run rss-watch with

rss-watch -i 1m https://github.com/mkroman/rss-watch/commits/master.atom ./publish-redis-message.sh

And it'll now check for new commits once a minute and publish the commit url to the channel some.channel.

Environment variables

This is a list of the environment variables that can be passed to the script.

Name | Description -----|----------- FEEDURL | The URL to the whole feed. <sup>Required</sup> FEEDGUID | The unique ID for the given entry. This is used to distinguish the entry from old ones. <sup>Required</sup> FEEDLINK | Link to the "full story" for this entry. On an Atom entry this will be the first "alternate" link. Optional FEEDTITLE | The title of the new entry. <sup>Optional</sup>

Installation

Prerequisites: * libsqlite3-dev

rss-watch is currently only available from crates.io or GitHub.

Installing the latest stable version with Cargo

cargo install rss-watch

Installing from git with Cargo

cargo install --git https://github.com/mkroman/rss-watch.git rss-watch

License

This software is licensed under the BSD 2-clause License.