RSSible

Paste a URL (HTML | JSON) + CSS selectors → RSS feed. Runs entirely on the free tier of Cloudflare Workers.

How it works

At its core, RSSible takes a webpage link and CSS selectors and turns it into an RSS feed. Try this link:

https://rssible.hadid.dev/feed?url=https://example.com&_item=div&title=h1&link=a&desc=p

The heavy lifting happens in a Cloudflare Worker using the HTMLRewriter API. When you hit /feed, the worker fetches the target URL, streams the HTML, and walks through it to extract feed items. Supported selectors:

• _item: container for items (required)
• title: title of each item (optional if link is provided)
• link: link of each item (optional if title is provided)
• desc: description of each item (optional)
• date: publication date of each item (optional, must be parsable by JS Date())

Optional filters param apply regex rules to include/exclude items. Also, optional headers param lets you pass custom headers to the fetch request. It's inconvenient to set these params manually, use the app page.

Warning

The headers param is not encrypted; don't use it to pass secrets. If you need to access private links, consider local hosting (see below).

JSON pages

JSON pages are also supported. Think of (public) APIs that return JSON, like:

• HN Algolia: https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/search_by_date?numericFilters=points>100
• Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/top/.json?t=week
• Github: https://api.github.com/users/sindresorhus/starred

To simplify things, JSON pages internally converted to a parsable HTML just enough for the HTMLRewriter to work on it. JSON key-value pairs are converted to (nested) HTML div tags, where the class name match the JSON keys. Root object has special _root class; array items _item class.

This JSON for example:

{
  "posts": [
    {
      "title": "Post 1",
      "url": "https://example.com/post-1",
      "content": "This is post 1",
      "published_at": "2024-01-01T00:00:00Z"
    },
    {
      "title": "Post 2",
      "url": "https://example.com/post-2",
      "content": "This is post 2",
      "published_at": "2024-01-02T00:00:00Z"
    }
  ]
}

Would be converted to:

<div class="_root">
  <div class="posts">
    <div class="_item">
      <div class="title">Post 1</div>
      <div class="url">https://example.com/post-1</div>
      <div class="content">This is post 1</div>
      <div class="published_at">2024-01-01T00:00:00Z</div>
    </div>
    <div class="_item">
      <div class="title">Post 2</div>
      <div class="url">https://example.com/post-2</div>
      <div class="content">This is post 2</div>
      <div class="published_at">2024-01-02T00:00:00Z</div>
    </div>
  </div>
</div>

As you may have guessed, you can use the same CSS selectors params for JSON links.

Use ?mirror=1 param to see the converted HTML version of a JSON page; here's an example: JSON page; converted HTML version.

Deploy your own instance

You can run this for free on Cloudflare Workers. They offer generous free tier limits: 100,000 requests/day. Yes, 100k as long as you keep it under 10ms CPU time per request. Static assets (public/**) are free and unlimited.

# Clone repo and navigate to it
git clone --depth 1 [email protected]:mhadidg/rssible.git && cd rssible

# Install Wrangler
npm i -D wrangler@latest

# Authenticate with Cloudflare
npx wrangler login

# Deploy to your account
npx wrangler deploy

Once deployed, you'll have a live endpoint:

https://rssible.your-subdomain.workers.dev

Run locally with Docker

You can also run RSSible in a container, handy for local- or self-hosting. Host locally if you want to access private links with auth headers.

# Navigate to project dir
cd rssible

# Build image
docker build -t rssible .

# Run container
docker run --rm -p 8787:8787 rssible

To keep the Docker container running locally (systemd) - start on boot, create a systemd unit file:

sudo tee /etc/systemd/system/rssible.service <<'EOF'
[Unit]
Description=RSSible
After=network.target docker.service
Requires=docker.service

[Service]
Restart=always
ExecStart=/usr/bin/docker run --rm -p 8787:8787 --name rssible rssible
ExecStop=/usr/bin/docker stop rssible

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
EOF

Then enable and start the service:

# Reload systemd to pick up new unit file
sudo systemctl daemon-reload

# Enable to start on boot
sudo systemctl enable rssible

# Start the service now
sudo systemctl start rssible

Check the logs to make sure things are all good:

sudo journalctl -u rssible.service -f

You've just made it like any other app on your system, except the UI is web-based on http://localhost:8787.

If are obsessed with desktop icons, Chrome supports shortcuts for web apps. That's also the case for most Chromium-based browsers (e.g., Brave).

Demo links

See demo links on the app page.

Acknowledgments

This project was inspired by Feedmaker, and uses water.css (CSS styles).

License

MIT: free and open-source.