How to setup tiny tiny rss on a raspberry pi

I normally use Feedly (the app on iOS and the website) to collect all my RSS feeds. After upgrading my PiHole DNS server's Raspberry Pi from the 3B to 3B+ I had a spare pi on hand. I decided to try using it as an Tiny Tiny RSS server. What follows are the steps needed to do this. It takes about 2 hours if all goes well :)

Note: I decided to use Postgres as the database for the Tiny Tiny RSS (TT-RSS) server since the TT-RSS documentation recommends it.

Warning: This guide does not have steps to secure your apache and postgres servers running on the pi. Do not expose this server on the internet. I used a VPN to connect to my local home network from the outside while travelling to read my feeds.

With that warning out of the way, here goes:

• I started with a clean install of Raspbian Stretch Lite

• Enable SSH on the pi (instructions here - follow the section - Enable SSH on a headless Raspberry Pi)

• After the Pi is setup, it has to be updated first

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y && sudo apt dist-upgrade
sudo apt-get autoremove
sudo apt-get clean
sudo apt-get check

• I love vim for editing configuration files. So let's install that next

sudo apt-get install vim

• Next install Apache

sudo apt-get install apache2

• Then PHP and PHP libraries

sudo apt-get install php libapache2-mod-php
sudo apt-get install php7.0-mbstring
sudo apt-get install php7.0-xml
sudo apt-get install php-curl php-pgsql php-intl

• Then install postgres. At the time of writing, the version available on the Raspbian repo is 9.6. You can find the version using

sudo apt-cache search postgresql | less

• Install Postgres

sudo apt-get install postgresql-9.6

• Install Git

sudo apt install git

• go to the apache document root. This is where the TT-RSS server PHP code will reside

cd /var/www/
sudo chmod -R 777 html
cd html

• now lets get the TT-RSS software

git clone https://tt-rss.org/git/tt-rss.git tt-rss

• time to prep Postgres. Login to Postgres and create the user and database which TT-RSS will use

sudo -u postgres psql postgres

• at the prompt do the following

CREATE ROLE ttrssuser LOGIN PASSWORD 'put in a password here';
CREATE DATABASE ttrssdb WITH OWNER = ttrssuser;

• type \q to exit the pgsql prompt

• check if it worked

psql -h localhost -d ttrssdb -U ttrssuser -p 5432

• enter the password you setup for the user. type \q to exit the pgsql prompt

• The TT-RSS documentation recommends enabling PHP's opcode cache. Lets do that next

• Where is the opcode library located? We need that so that we can enter it in the php.ini file

sudo find / -name opcache.so
/usr/lib/php/20151012/opcache.so

• where is the php.ini to enable opcode cache in?

sudo find / -name php.ini
/etc/php/7.0/apache2/php.ini

• first backup the file

sudo cp -pv /etc/php/7.0/apache2/php.ini /etc/php/7.0/apache2/php.ini_BAK

• edit the file

sudo vi /etc/php/7.0/apache2/php.ini

• Add the following lines and save the file

in the ; Dynamic Extensions ; sectionadd the following lines
extension=/usr/lib/php/20151012/pdo_pgsql.so
extension=/usr/lib/php/20151012/pgsql.so

in the [opcache] section
zend_extension=/usr/lib/php/20151012/opcache.so
opcache.enable=1
opcache.enable_cli=1
opcache.memory_consumption=128
opcache.interned_strings_buffer=8
opcache.max_accelerated_files=4000
opcache.revalidate_freq=60
opcache.fast_shutdown=1

• check if the opcode cache is enabled and the PHP data objects driver for Postgres is loaded

• to do this, create a info.php file in /var/www/html

sudo vi /var/www/html/info.php

• put this line in the file and save it

<?php phpinfo(); ?>

• Change owner to pi for this file

sudo chown pi:pi info.php
chmod 755 info.php

• Restart apache

sudo service apache2 restart

• From a browser hit the apache server

http://yourraspberrypi/info.php

• check for the following lines in the output

Opcode Caching     Up and Running

PDO drivers     pgsql

PostgreSQL(libpq) Version     9.6.7

• now it's time to configure tt-rss. Back to the command line

• Give write permissions to the pi user first

cd /var/www/html
chmod 777 tt-rss
cd tt-rss
chmod -R 777 cache/images
chmod -R 777 cache/upload
chmod -R 777 cache/export
chmod -R 777 cache/js
chmod -R 777 feed-icons
chmod -R 777 lock

• From a browser hit the tiny tiny rss install link

http://yourraspberrypi/tt-rss/install/

• enter your database connection details (for the hostname I used localhost), test the configuration and initialize the database

• login to tt-rss (http://yourraspberrypi/tt-rss) and change the default password. Import your opml file. For this do the steps from this excellent Lifehacker article Step Four: Log In and Import Your Feeds

• Enable api access so that you can use iOS apps to connect to the TT-RSS server. Click the Actions menu at the top-right corner of the screen and select Preferences. Next click the checkmark next to Enable API access. Save configuration by clicking the button at the bottom of the screen
• setup crontab to refresh your feeds. To reduce wear on the Raspberry Pi SD card, I setup cron to run every 2 hours to refresh the feed. Back on the command line

crontab -e

• add this line and save

1 */2 * * * /usr/bin/php /var/www/html/tt-rss/update.php --feeds --quiet

that's it. Enjoy your new RSS feed aggregator server!

For iOS I used the app Fiery Feeds to connect to my TT-RSS server over VPN to read my feeds.