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	$XDG_DATA_HOME/rss-watch/database.db
MacOS	$HOME/Library/Application Support/rss-watch/database.db
Windows	%LOCALAPPDATA%\mkroman\rss-watch\database.db

You may want to run rss-watch with --import-only the first time you're watching a new feed, as this will import the current feed entries without running the scripts.

rss-watch --import-only https://blog.rust-lang.org/feed.xml

Then, to watch and refresh a feed every 6 hours and execute ./some-script.sh for each new entry, run:

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

Examples

Publish a Redis message when there's a new commit

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

#!/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 -r 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
FEED_URL	The URL to the whole feed. Required
FEED_GUID	The unique ID for the given entry. This is used to distinguish the entry from old ones. Required
FEED_LINK	Link to the "full story" for this entry. On an Atom entry this will be the first "alternate" link. Optional
FEED_TITLE	The title of the new entry. Optional

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.