Creating my blog BOT with feed2fedi

Yesterday, I wrote about my recent change in using the fediverse. One of them being a new blog BOT account that toot a new message for each new blog entry like this one. The goal of this post is to describe how it works.

To do this, I’m using Feed2fedi, a simple tool that takes RSS feeds as input and post a toot for each new article (using a sqlite cache to avoid duplication). This tool worked perfectly with GoToSocial :). To install Feed2fedi, you can either build the source or simply use pipx. On debian:

# apt install pipx
$ pipx ensurepath
$ pipx install feed2fedi

Once installed, you need to run it to configure. Use the -c option to specify where to save the config file. In my case:

~/.local/bin/feed2fedi -c ~/.config/feed2fedi/blog-config.json

Then follow the wizard by giving the instance URL and the token generated on the linked provided by the command line.

Once done, edit the generated configuration file to add your RSS feed(s) URL(s). Multiple URLs can be added, but in my case this BOT is only for my blog so only 1 URL was needed. My configuration file looks like this:

{
    "feeds": [
        {
            "url": "https://bacardi55.io/posts/index.xml",
            "prefix": "[New Blog Post]",
            "max_attachments": "max"
        }
    ],
    "fedi_instance": "https://social.bacardi55.io",
    "fedi_access_token": "<redacted>",
    "cache_max_age": 30,
    "cache_db_path": "~/.config/feed2fedi/cache-blog.sqlite",
    "bot_post_media": false,
    "bot_post_visibility": "public",
    "bot_post_template": "{title}\\n\\n{link}"
}

Read the configuration file explaination to understand more the config above.

Now that this is done, running feed2fedi should import the latest posts to the connected account, simply by running:

~/.local/bin/feed2fedi -c /home/<user>/.config/feed2fedi/blog-config.json

Last task is to automate the start of feed2fedi via a cron task. To do so, launch crontab -e and add:

55 * * * * /home/<user>/.local/bin/feed2fedi -c /home/<user>/.config/feed2fedi/blog-config.json >> /home/<user>/.config/feed2fedi/blog.log

Of course, adapt to your needs / configuration.

Next time, I’ll talk about the links BOT that was a bit more complicated due to the lack of RSS feeds for public shared links on linkding… But nothing RSS Bridge couldn’t fixed!