The Blogegator

The Blogegator is a CLI tool that will aggregate RSS feeds, allowing multiple users for follow desired feeds.

Requirements

In order to use The Blogegator, you will need to download and install Go and PostgreSQL.

To install Go follow the instructions here.

(*PostgreSQL installation and set up instructions adopted from Boot.dev)

To use PostgreSQL, you will install the server and start it. Then, you can connect to it using a client like psql or PGAdmin.

Mac OS with brew

brew install postgresql@15

Linux / WSL (Debian). Here are the docs from Microsoft, but simply:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install postgresql postgresql-contrib

Ensure the installation worked. The psql command-line utility is the default client for Postgres. Use it to make sure you're on version 15+ of Postgres:

psql --version

(Linux only) Update postgres password:

sudo passwd postgres

Enter a password, and be sure you won't forget it. You can just use something easy like postgres.

Set Up

Clone this repo and start a terminal in its root directory.

PostgreSQL

Start the Postgres server in the background

• Mac: brew services start postgresql
• Linux: sudo service postgresql start

Connect to the server. Enter the psql shell:

• Mac: psql postgres
• Linux: sudo -u postgres psql

You should see a new prompt that looks like this:

postgres=#

Create a new database. I called mine gator:

CREATE DATABASE gator;

Connect to the new database:

\c gator

You should see a new prompt that looks like this:

gator=#

Set the user password (Linux only)

ALTER USER postgres PASSWORD 'your_password';

Schema

Install goose to handle establishing the database schema

go install github.com/pressly/goose/v3/cmd/goose@latest

Determine your connection string to the Postgres database. The format is:

protocol://username:password@host:port/database

It should look something like this

postgres://postgres:your_password@localhost:5432/gator

From the root directory of the Blogegator direcotry, cd into the sql/schema directory and run:

goose postgres <connection_string> up

Configuration

In your home directory, create the file .gatorconfig.json. In the file, create a JSON object with the single field db_url. It's value will be the database connection string from above with an additional sslmode=disable query string.

protocol://username:password@host:port/database?sslmode=disable

The complete file should look like the following:

{
  "db_url": "postgres://postgres:postgres@localhost:5432/gator?sslmode=disable"
}

Usage

The Blogegator has the following commands:

Syntax	Description
register <username>	Register a new user.
login <username>	Switch the current user. User must be registered.
reset	Reset the list of registered users.
users	Show a list of registered users.
addfeed <name> <url>	Add a feed to be aggregated. Add to user list of followed feeds
feeds	Show a list of feeds being aggregated.
follow <url>	Follow the specified feed. Must be added first.
unfollow <url>	Remove feed from following list for user.
following	Show a list of feeds being followed by the current user.
browse [limit]	Show the most [limit]recent posts. If not specified [limit] is 2
agg <time_between_reqs>	Begin aggregating feeds, checking the next feed every <time_between_reqs>. This command should be started and left running on a separate terminal