martymcguire / entanglement

Brain-dead RSS republishing for feeds using Basic Authentication or those from Trac

Entanglement - an RSS proxy for authenticated feeds

Entanglement is a simple Sinatra-based RSS proxy system to ease access to RSS feeds protected by HTTP Basic Authentication, and RSS feeds that can "misbehave" (such as password-protected Trac Timeline feeds. It was written to scratch an itch about Google Reader, which does not support any kind of authenticated feed.

The basic premise is that you enter your feed URLs and credentials into Entanglement, which will provide a new, non-authenticated feed URL that you can enter into your non-auth-friendly RSS reader (for example, Google Reader).

Overview

• You can add feed information (URL, username, password, authentication type) via the management form on the main page, or upload an OPML file to add several feeds with the same username/password/type.
• Your feeds' URLs, usernames, and passwords are used to create a SHA1 digest which acts as the ID for that feed.
• Entanglement exports an OPML file for you to load in your favorite misbehaving RSS reader.
• Feed configuration is stored locally in YAML files (which you should make sure are readable only by you).
• Feed management is protected by Basic Authentication, with access controlled via a simple .htaccess file.
• A 30-minute local filesystem cache is used to keep traffic reasonable.
• Be sure to protect the non-authenticated URLs provided by Entanglement. If you do hand out a URL that you didn't want to, you can change the URL for all feeds by changing the value of @@salt in lib/feed.rb, though you will have to delete and re-add all of your feeds.

Deployment

Required Gems:

• Sinatra
  • Tested with version 0.9.0.2, also requires Thin
• HAML
  • Tested w/2.0.6
• Nokogiri
  • Tested w/ 1.1.1
• HTAuth
  • Tested w/ 1.0.3

Deployment Steps

1. Clone this project to the deployment machine

2. Copy config/config.yml.example to config/config.yml and edit it to your liking. Make sure the value for salt is unique!

3. Create the .htpaswd file

   $ htpasswd -c data/.htpasswd

4. Test things out with Sinatra and visit http://localhost:4567/ with your browser:

   $ ruby app.rb

5. Deploy in your favorite manner. For instance, with Phusion Passenger

Authors

• Robert McGuire [email protected]

Credits

Logo derived from RSS-vector.psd, found on the article Create a Vector RSS Icon with Illustrator.

OPML icon from http://opmlicons.com/

License

The MIT License

Copyright © 2009 Robert McGuire

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal
in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights
to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell
copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is
furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in
all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,
FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE
AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER
LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM,
OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN
THE SOFTWARE.