Feedbin in Docker

Info About This Fork

This is a fork of angristan/feedbin-docker with a couple minor changes and fixes, as well as clearer documentaiion. I am in no way an "expert" but I'm using this as a learning oppurtunity. I hope this helps anyone trying to selfhost Feedbin!

Please note, this setup is rather involved. While I am working to make this as easy as possible, this may not be the best choice if you do not at least have some experience with Docker and selfhosting.

Also feedbin is pretty resource hungry, so you will not have a good time trying to host this on an entrylevel VPS.

That being said, contributions are always welcome and I do think this is one of the better (selfhostable) feedreaders out there.

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Self-host Feedbin with Docker. Feedbin is a web based RSS reader. It's an open-source Ruby on Rails software.

Feedbin's main goal is not to be easily self-hostable, and it was quite hard getting all of the services to work. During the process of creating feedbin-docker, I made a few contributions to the upstream project to make it self-hostable. Other have taken other approaches by forking it, but all the projects I found on GitHub were abandonned and weren't working anymore.

I chose to run it in Docker because of all the services required to run Feedbin.

Here is a breakdown of all the containers:

• web: the puma rails app
• workers: some of the sidekiq workers for background processing
• refresher: sidekiq worker for refreshing feeds
• image: sidekiq worker to find thumbnails
• extract: nodejs service to extract article content from full web pages
• camo: a node reverse proxy to prevent mixed content
• minio: object storage for images, favicons, imports
• redis: cache, store sidekiq queues and stats
• memcached: cache
• postgresql: database
• elasticsearch: full text search
• caddy: https-enabled reverse proxy

As you can see it's a lot. Technically, you can give up on a few of them without breaking Feedbin:

• image: you won't have thumbnails, which is not that important depending on your appearance settings.
• camo: your browser will make the requests directly to the websites. Less privacy and risk or mixed content.
• elasticsearch: you won't have full text search

You can also replace caddy with another reverse proxy, but caddy is really handy.

Setup

0. Prerequisites

• I recommend a server with more than 2 GB of RAM. Otherwise you will likely have OOM kills.
• You will also need a domain setup. In your DNS, create A records pointing to your IP address for feedbin, camo.feedbin, minio.feedbin, and extract.feedbin. It is important to you do this before attempting installation. Otherwise, this will not work.
• Clone this repo, by running:

git clone https://github.com/gotmax/feedbin-docker.git

1. Edit .env file

• Copy .env.example to .env.
• Fill in MINIO_ACCESS_KEY, MINIO_SECRET_KEY, CAMO_KEY, SECRET_KEY_BASE, POSTGRESS_PASSWORD, and EXTRACT_SECRET. I recommend randomly generating seperate alphanumeric passwords for each of these values. Having secure passwords is especially crucial as this installation is exposed to the internet.
• Then, you should fill AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID and AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY with the same values as MINIO_ACCESS_KEYand MINIO_SECRET_KEY, respectively.
• Replace all occurences of domain.tld with the domain you plan on using.
• Fill in email server details for automated Feedbin emails. I have my own email server, but if you don't, there are several options to obtain an email address with SMTP access.

2. Copy docker-compose and Caddyfile examples to proper locations

• Copy docker-compose.yml.example to docker-compose.yml. If you want to disable a service this is the place. Also run mkdir volumes to create the folder where the Docker volumes are stored to by default.
• Copy caddy/Caddyfile.example to caddy/Caddyfile and update the domains, just as you did in the .env file.

3. Database Setup

Initialize the database:

docker-compose up -d feedbin-postgres feedbin-web && docker exec -ti feedbin-web rake db:setup && docker-compose down

If you get an error message here, please double check your .env file and try checking the logs for feedbin-web or feedbin-postgres by running docker logs -f feedbin-web or docker logs -f feedbin-postgres.

4. Minio Setup

Now that you've finished the database setup, you can launch the rest of the containers, by running:

docker-compose up -d

• Go to minio.feedbin.domain.tld and login with the keys from the .env file.

• Create a bucket named feedbin with the plus button in the bottom right hand corner.

5. Finish Up

• I recommend restarting the containers at this point, by running:

docker-compose down && docker-compose up -d

• Once the containers are up, you can check if everything is going well with docker-compose logs -f or docker-compose ps.

• Then, go to feedbin.domain.tld and create a new account. You're set!

• You can make yourself an admin to manage users and to view the Sidekiq web interface, by running:

docker-compose exec feedbin-web rake feedbin:make_admin[[email protected]]

Once you're done, you can prevent new users from registering by modifying cour Caddy config.

6. Maintenance

I recommend updating your container images each time you update your system. To do so, open the your feedbin-docker directory and run this command:

docker-compose pull && docker-compose build --no-cache && docker-compose up -d

I am working on setting up CI so the containers will automatically build each time a commit is pushed to this repo, so users don't need to build the cotainers themselves.