Miniflux

Minimalist feed reader with a REST API.

Overview

Miniflux is a self-hosted RSS, Atom, RDF and JSON feed reader written in Go. It has no JavaScript framework, no tracking and no account service behind it: a single binary talks to a Postgres database and serves HTML, plus a REST API and the Fever and Google Reader APIs for third-party clients.

This template runs upstream's official image unmodified. It is the reader itself, not a wrapper: there is no overlay Dockerfile here, and no code in this repository is between you and the app.

What you get by hosting it

• Your reading list and read state in a database you own, instead of in a vendor's account.
• A REST API and Fever and Google Reader endpoints, so mobile clients (Reeder, NetNewsWire, FocusReader) read the same account.
• Built-in article scraping, filtering rules and full-text search over what you have fetched.
• Automatic refreshes on a schedule the service runs itself, with no external cron.

What you need before deploying

• A username and password for the first account (ADMIN_USERNAME and ADMIN_PASSWORD). Miniflux refuses a password shorter than 6 characters.
• Nothing else. Feeds are added in the app after it starts.

Configuration

The template also declares a postgres service. Its DATABASE_URL is bound into the web service by the platform; there is nothing to configure.

Fixed by the template: RUN_MIGRATIONS=1 (Miniflux owns its schema and migrates on boot), CREATE_ADMIN=1 (seeds the first account, and is a no-op on every later boot), HTTPS=1 (TLS is terminated at the edge, so saying so is what marks the session cookie Secure), BASE_URL (the service's own URL, used for the absolute links the app generates) and LISTEN_ADDR.

The service listens on port 8080 and is health-checked on /healthcheck, which is the app's own readiness probe: 200 once it can reach the database, 503 while it cannot. / is not used for this. It renders the login page and answers 200 whether or not the database is reachable, so it would report healthy on a deploy that cannot serve a single feed.

It is declared alwaysOn: true. The feed scheduler fires from inside the process, so a machine that had scaled to zero would never wake to refresh a feed. That bills continuously.

After deploy

1. Open the service URL and sign in with the ADMIN_USERNAME and ADMIN_PASSWORD you set.
2. Add a feed from the top navigation and paste a site or feed URL. Miniflux discovers the feed document from a page URL.
3. Unread lists what it fetched. Feeds refresh on the schedule; "Refresh all feeds" on the Feeds page forces a pass now.
4. To read from a phone, go to Settings → API Keys, create a key, and point a client at the service URL with your username and that key.

Links

• Architectures: linux/amd64 and linux/arm64. Upstream's 2.3.3 index carries both (and arm/v6, arm/v7 and riscv64 besides); nothing is rebuilt here.
• Upstream: https://github.com/miniflux/v2
• Documentation: https://miniflux.app/docs/
• Image: docker.io/miniflux/miniflux, pinned to 2.3.3
• License: Apache-2.0 (upstream miniflux/v2).