Setting up RSS Bridge

RSS Bridge is a useful utility you can use to help you avoid the big tech sites, like Facebook and Twitter, which instead of the feed you usually would see, will be a based and minimalist RSS feed.

You'll need a server or VPS. Nearly any Operating system is supported but for this tutorial I'm gonna presume you're using a Debian-based OS. You'll also need a domain name pointing to your server's IP address which is explained in this tutorial.

Installation

Setting Up and Configuring

First things first you'll need to make sure that you've hardened you SSH so that password authentication is disabled and you'll also want to setup Fail2Ban. There's a great tutorial on how to do this which can be read here.

Next we'll install the required packages: 

apt install -y curl unzip nginx certbot php-fpm php-mysql php-cli php7.3-mbstring php7.3-curl php7.3-xml php7.3-sqlite3 php7.3-json

We now have to create the website configuration file. Create/open the a file below:

nano /etc/nginx/sites-available/rss-bridge

And add the following content:

server {
    root /var/www/rss-bridge;
    index index.php index.html index.htm index.nginx-debian.html;
    server_name rss-bridge.example.org;

    location / {
            try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
    }

    location ~ \.php$ {
            include snippets/fastcgi-php.conf;
            fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php/php7.3-fpm.sock;
    }

    location ~ /\.ht {
            deny all;
    }
}

After you have saved the file, you need to create a symlink so the server actually will read the file.

ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/rss-bridge /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/rss-bridge

Then we have to create the folder where the service will reside in.

mkdir -p /var/www/rss-bridge
cd /var/www/rss-bridge

Lets download the latest version of RSS-Bridge in the directory.

The newest version can be found here, at the time of writing that is "RSS-Bridge 2021-04-25."

wget https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge/archive/refs/tags/2021-04-25.zip

Unzip the file:

unzip 2021-04-25.zip

This will create a directory called rss-bridge-version-number, we now want to move all the file contents of the newly created directory to the one we are in

mv rss-bridge-2021-04-25/* .
rm -rf rss-bridge-2021-04-25 2021-04-25.zip

Now all we need to do is grant read/write permissions and reload the web server.

chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/rss-bridge
systemctl reload nginx

That's it, you should now have a working rss-bridge installed. But you should definately get an SSL certifcate installed which is done briefly here.