Auto-archiving for older unread posts in Feedbin, inspired by Pocket Casts’ configurable auto-archive feature.

Someone in the microblogging/pro-RSS community — I forget who — recently posted something along the lines of “RSS shouldn’t be a source of stress. It’s okay to just mark it all as read and move on.”

The same is true of podcasts. To help with that, Pocket Casts has an auto-archive feature which is quite configurable on a per-feed basis, and that feature helps me avoid stress during times when I’ve fallen behind on podcasts.

With RSS, I find myself hesitant to mark a long list of entries as read; I can’t help but worry, “what if there’s something I really should read down there somewhere?”

So I built this tool. It’s designed to be run on a periodic basis (2-4 times per day, perhaps). It will mark as read everything in your Feedbin account older than some time period (30 days, by default), and it allows configuring a custom maximum unread “age” per feed.

Instapaper Auto Archiver performs a similar function, for old unread Instapaper bookmarks.

Pre-built Docker images are available. See Docker Hub for details.

No installation is required to use these images under Docker.

1. Clone the repo and change into the feedbin-auto-archiver directory
2. Run make virtualenv to create a virtualenv for the project & install dependencies

Credentials are supplied via the environment variables FEEDBIN_ARCHIVER_USERNAME and FEEDBIN_ARCHIVER_PASSWORD.

Credentials may be placed in a .env file and given to the docker run command like:

docker run --rm --env-file .env cdzombak/feedbin-auto-archiver:1 [OPTIONS]

(See .env.sample for a sample file.)

Alternatively, credentials may be passed directly to the docker run command like:

docker run --rm -e FEEDBIN_ARCHIVER_USERNAME=myusername -e FEEDBIN_ARCHIVER_PASSWORD=mypassword \
    cdzombak/feedbin-auto-archiver:1 [OPTIONS]

Your credentials can be stored in a .env file alongside the feedbin_archiver.py script. The script will automatically read environment variables from that file. (See .env.sample for an example.)

The rules file is a JSON file specifying per-feed maximum entry ages. The file is allowed to contain comments, allowing for clarity & easier maintenance. See rules.sample.json for an example.

The file must contain an object with two top-level keys: max_age and feed_specific.

max_age is equivalent to the --max-age argument; any entries older than that age will be marked as read, unless they’re in a feed for which you’ve created a custom rule.

feed_specific is a list of objects, each of which have two keys, like this:

"feed_specific": [
    {
        // Add comment with Feed Name for maintainability
        "feed_id": 450,
        "max_age": 1
    }, // …
]

Those feed-specific rules take precedence over max_age. This allows you to set a quicker expiration for high-traffic feeds, or set a longer expiration for feeds with entries you really don’t want to miss.

To avoid the archiver marking anything as read in a given feed, specify 999999999 for the feed’s max_age. (That is roughly 2.7 million years.)

This is the maximum number of days a Python timedelta object can represent.

Invoke the script with docker run. To use a rules file, you will need to mount it into the container.

docker run --rm --env-file .env \
    -v /path/to/my_rules.json:/rules.json \
    cdzombak/feedbin-auto-archiver:1 \
    --rules-file /rules.json [--dry-run false] [OPTIONS]

1. Activate the virtualenv: . venv/bin/activate
2. Run the script: python feedbin_archiver.py --rules-file /path/to/my_rules.json [--dry-run false] [OPTIONS]

Alternatively, invoke the virtualenv's Python interpreter directly:

venv/bin/python3 feedbin_archiver.py --rules-file /path/to/my_rules.json [--dry-run false] [OPTIONS]

All flags are optional (though if you omit --dry-run, no changes will ever be made in your Feedbin account).

Boolean. Default: True.

Dry-run specifies whether the script should actually change anything in your Feedbin account. By default, this is true, meaning no changes will be made.

Once you’re confident in your configuration, activate the script with --dry-fun false.

Integer. Default: 30.

The maximum age for unread entries. Entries older than this will be marked as read.

This argument is ignored when using a rules file (see --rules-file below).

Integer. Default: none.

Only archive entries in the given feed. This is useful for eg. debugging or one-off archiving tasks.

String (path/filename). Default: none.

The path to a JSON file describing your per-feed rules. See “Configuration” below for details.

If a rules file is specified, the --max-age flag has no effect.

Run python feedbin_archiver.py list-feeds to print a list of your Feedbin feeds, along with their IDs, for use in writing per-feed rules.

The output is grep-able. For example, to find my blog feed, try python feedbin_archiver.py list-feeds | grep -i "chris dzombak"

(For Docker, run docker run --rm --env-file .env cdzombak/feedbin-auto-archiver:1 list-feeds.)

This is how I’m running this tool on my home server:

# Feedbin Archiver
# Runs every 6 hours == 4x/day
0   */6 *   *   *   docker run --rm --env-file $HOME/.config/feedbin/env -v $HOME/.config/feedbin/archiver_rules.json:/rules.json cdzombak/feedbin-auto-archiver:1 --rules-file /rules.json --dry-run false

MIT License.

Chris Dzombak

• github.com/cdzombak
• dzombak.com