Gator

RSS Blog Aggregator CLI tool written in Go

Until I can get the windows branch working, if you want to run this program on a windows pc you will need to use WSL2. This is very simple as it's a package directly from microsoft.

Open your command line with <Win + R> then type cmd and press <Enter>. This will open the command line, now type or copy and paste the following command into your command line:

wsl --install

then reboot your pc when it finishes installing. After it finishes installing a window called Ubuntu should automatically open. If not you may need to open it manually by pressing <Win> and typing Ubuntu. You should now have access to a linux terminal! You can open this terminal by pressing <Win> and typing terminal or by opening the command line or powershell and using the GUI to open a new terminal of any type.

To run this program you will need the latest version of the Go toolchain and Postgres installed on your machine to install the binary. Most users will find it easiest to use curl to install it.

To install the latest version of the Go toolchain, run the following command or visit https://go.dev/doc/install and select the version appropriate for your OS.

curl -sS https://webi.sh/golang | sh

if you don't already have curl installed, you can get it with

sudo apt update
sudo apt install curl

Gator requires at least version 16.6 of PostgreSQL to run.

To install postgres, run the following commands

sudo apt update
sudo apt install postgresql postgresql-contrib

Finally you'll need to enter a password, run the following command. The default server configuration is "postgres://postgres:postgres@localhost:5432/gator?sslmode=disable". where the 3rd "postgres" is the password for the database. When you set your password, if you choose postgres then the program will work right out of the box. Otherwise, run the program once to generate a .gatorconfig.json in your home directory. Use a text editor of your choice to edit this file and change ONLY the url password section to whatever password you set here. DO NOT FORGET THIS PASSWORD. Although possible to get back into your postgres database, it is significantly more difficult than remembering a password.

sudo passwd postgres

After setting the password, start the postgres server in the background using

sudo service postgresql start

The final step is you need to set a user that Gator can connect to. Enter your database with

sudo -u postgres psql

once you're in your database, run the following command:

ALTER USER postgres PASSWORD 'postgres';

and finally type exit to return to the terminal.

Modify your config file if you set a different password, and you're ready to use Gator!

After you have installed Go and Postgres, open your terminal/shell and run

go install github.com/Daxin319/Gator@latest

Once the program has installed, run it with Gator [command] [arguments]

If this is the first time you're launching Gator, you'll need to register a user. Run Gator register [username] to register a new user. If you have more than 1 user, you can use Gator login <username> to change users.

To reset the database and clear all data, run Gator reset

To see a list of users, run Gator users

To see a list of all RSS feeds currently stored in the database, run Gator feeds

To see a list of RSS feeds currently followed by the current user, run Gator following

To add an RSS feed to the database, run Gator addfeed [feed_name] [feed_url]. The feed_name cannot contain spaces. This will also cause the current user to follow the RSS feed.

If an RSS feed already exists, you can follow it for the current user with Gator follow [feed_url]

You can unfollow a feed with Gator unfollow [feed_url]

To begin content aggregation, run Gator agg [time_between_requests] where time_between_requests is formatted like "30s", "1h", "3.5h", "20m" etc.

To browse aggregated stories, run Gator browse [optional_limit]. If no limit provided it will default to the 3 most recent items.