rdigest

Create "daily digests" of your (RSS) feeds.

Started as a project to build something in Haskell ("learn by building"), has grown into a tool I use to manage my daily catch-up of internet links.

What does this do?

How to run this?

• Grab the executable from the releases. At the time of writing this, binaries are built for MacOS (latest, M* architecture) and Linux machines (x86-64) only but this should be sufficient unless you're running Windows.

• Make the executable "executable":

> tar -xzf rdigest_darwin_arm64_v0.3.1.tar.gz # you have to change this to point to the correct file that you downloaded from the release
> chmod +x rdigest

• Set env var specifying which folder rdigest should use:

> export RDIGEST_FOLDER=./path/to/folder

• Run rdigest init to get started:

> rdigest init

rdigest commands

rdigest has a few commands.

Make sure you set up an RDIGEST_FOLDER environment variable before you use rdigest. This tool will create a SQLite file, and when you want the daily digests, it will create them too and it needs a path/folder to put these in.

> export RDIGEST_FOLDER=<path-to-where-rdigest-data-should-be-stored>

# prints help
> rdigest help

# adds an RSS feed, and will immediately get posts from that feed and add to the database
> rdigest add <feed_url>

# removes the feed and deletes all posts that belong to that feed
> rdigest remove <feed_url>

# show all feeds
> rdigest list feeds

# refresh all feeds, get all their posts/content and update the database. No duplicate content will be added though.
> rdigest refresh

# create today's digest.
> rdigest digest

# create a digest between the date range
> rdigest digest --from YYYY-MM-DD --to YYYY-MM-DD

# just update one feed
> rdigest refresh <feed_url>

# send notifications to Telegram channel
> rdigest notify
# check the Telegram Notification section for more info

# delete everything, remove the database. This won't delete the digests.
> rdigest purge

Telegram Notification

rdigest can, if needed, send the daily digest links as messages to a Telegram chat/channel.

To do this:

• create a Telegram bot and grab the bot's token.
• create a Telegram channel and get the channel's ID (usually a negative integer)
• invite the bot you created into the channel you created with Admin-like privileges (ie, the bot should be able to post messages to the channel)
• in your terminal where you run rdigest, set these env vars:

> export TG_TOKEN=<bot token>
> export TG_CHANNEL_ID=<the channel id>

• get rdigest to send the notifications:

> rdigest notify

Links that are sent as notifications will be marked, so they won't be sent again.

Note: Due to Telegram's rate limits, rdigest will space-out batches of notifications, with ~1 minute wait time between sending out each batch of 20 or so notifications.

Roadmap

• create pre-built binaries for Linux for release
• create pre-built binaries for Mac for release
• add TG bot notification support
• add GUI