Bye Bye Inoreader

I have been an Inoreader free tier user for the last year. But last week I started to seek an alternative, because there was missing functionality that would make my life much happier:

1. Non-limited RSS feeds: I have always wanted an alternative to the standard way of managing Youtube subscriptions¹, and I liked the idea to build a tiny set of scripts to filter subreddits based on upvotes like https://hnrss.github.io for Hackernews. So the 150 RSS feed limit always prevented me from moving all my Youtube subscriptions to RSS or having a fun time building my custom RSS feeds.

2. Filtering RSS feeds is only available for premium users.

That’s when Miniflux appeared. I fell in love immediately:

• Written in Go – have good experience with tools written in Go overall.
• Basic filters.
• Open source.
• Minimal – so it can be easily deployed in a cheap VPS.

I got Miniflux up and running in a few minutes.

Deployment

I used t2.micro EC2 instance with a Debian AMI.

1. Download the latest binary from miniflux releases.

2. Install miniflux (in the directory of the .deb binary):

   # apt install ./miniflux*
   

3. Install Postgres:

   # apt install postgresql postgresql-client
   # createuser miniflux -P
   # createdb -O miniflux miniflux
   

4. Edit /etc/miniflux.conf so that you include a DATABASE_URL=<your_db> line.

5. Run the SQL migrations:

   miniflux -migrate -config-file /etc/miniflux.conf
   

6. Create an admin user:

   miniflux -create-admin -config-file /etc/miniflux.conf
   

7. Restart service:

   # systemctl restart miniflux.service
   

Now Miniflux should be listening on port 8080.

Since this setup is for a VPS, https is a must, in my case I’m using certbot with nginx.