FreshRSS installation and tweaks
I’ve recently switched to FreshRSS as my main RSS reader. Here are a few notes for me, really, about simple installation on an Apache/PHP system, and a few tweaks. I’ll probably come back to this later and update it a little more.
Installing FreshRSS on Amazon Linux AL2023
I’m using a Lightsail box running Amazon Linux 2023.
Assuming you have a working PHP/Apache setup, here’s how to do it quickly and without any hassle…
sudo dnf install git php-zip
cd /usr/share/
sudo git clone https://github.com/FreshRSS/FreshRSS.git
sudo chown -R apache:apache /usr/share/FreshRSS
sudo vi /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf
… and with the last vi command, you’ll want to then add the following into the HTTPD conf:
<VirtualHost *:80>
DocumentRoot "/usr/share/FreshRSS/p"
Servername freshrss.yourdomain.example.com
<Directory /usr/share/FreshRSS/p>
AllowOverride AuthConfig FileInfo Indexes Limit
Require all granted
</Directory>
AllowEncodedSlashesOn
</VirtualHost>
Then you can install it by simply visiting the domain you set up (under Servername, above), and typing in details of your database and usernames etc. I think this has set all the permissions correctly.
And then, obvs, go use Certbot to add SSL to all of this, because you probably want that.
To make FreshRSS automatically refresh feeds
You probably want it to do that, because otherwise if you’re using a third-party program to check your RSS feeds, you’ve no real way of getting it to update your feeds without also visiting the website.
sudo vi /etc/systemd/system/freshrss-refreshfeeds.service
and create a file like
[Unit]
Description=FreshRSS get new content
Wants=freshrss.timer
[Service]
User=apache
Type=simple
ExecStart=/usr/bin/php /usr/share/FreshRSS/app/actualize_script.php
Then
sudo vi /etc/systemd/system/freshrss-refreshfeeds.timer
and create a file like
[Unit]
Description=FreshRSS get new content
[Timer]
OnBootSec=30s
OnCalendar=*:0/20
[Install]
WantedBy=timers.target
…and then activate it using
sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl enable freshrss-refreshfeeds.timer
sudo systemctl start freshrss-refreshfeeds.timer
If you want to check it’s running, then you can obviously just wait; but you can also see that by typing:
systemctl list-timers
To make FreshRSS look better
The default font on the default user theme is not good, and has been badly configured so your system is approximating a bold font. It makes FreshRSS look much worse than it needs to. But there’s a simple fix.
- In the settings menu, go to “User extensions” and turn on User CSS.
- In the settings menu for that, add the following in “Additional CSS rules”…
html, body{font-family:system-ui !important;}
(system-ui is your system’s standard font-face, which is typically built to look really good on your machine.)