Setup your own RSS Server

Since Google shutdown its RSS reader application last year, a lot of people are still missing the great convenience the tool provided to syndicate information all over the web in one place. the truth is, I haven’t missed Google Reader a bit, because I switched to something better, and best of all, I’m pretty sure it won’t go away this time.

Here are some screenshots of my RSS server setup.

liferea RSS client 

This is the web client, compatible with every browser:

 

and this is my Android client for my mobile device:

As you can see, I have access to my RSS server from everywhere, and anytime I want to. the RSS server I’m talking about is Tiny Tiny RSS  (TT-RSS)  You will need a dedicated web hosting account or access to a physical server running apache, MYSQL and PHP 5 or compatible. Everything else, including, but not limited to, shared hosting accounts, windows and other alternative OSes, free tiers of PaaS services of any kind, is not supported. Not supported in this case meaning: it may work in your particular case but if you have problems you are on your own. the server specific requirements are:

  • Apache Web Server
  • MySQL
  • PHP 5.3

If you have an Ubuntu server you can install all those components with a simple command  “sudo apt-get install lamp-server^” and if you have a “shared hosting account” most likely those components are already installed on the server.

Create the database

Log in to your MySQL server by typing this command:

mysql -u root -p

Create the database by issuing this command:

create database “tt-rss”;

then type “quit”

Download the TT-RSS tarball from the following URL http://tt-rss.org/redmine/projects/tt-rss/wiki extract it and upload it to your web server root folder. for example the root web folder of my server is “www” and I have tt-rss on a folder call “feed”  now point your browser to that URL. for example, the URL for me is http://forevergeeks.com/feed/install/ is everything is set correctly, you will get the following screen:

enter the database type which is “MySQL” and the username for the MySQL server which is “root”  and the password for the root account. remember, this root account is different from your server root account. enter “localhost” for host name, and port number which is 3306 for MySQL.

click on “Test Configuration” and if everything is set correctly, your TT-RSS should be now installed.