Tiny Tiny RSS - Hands-on

I have been using RSS feed aggregators for quite some time. I was using Flym on my OnePlus 7T and my Huawei MediaPad M2 Tab almost constantly but the fact that I was not able to sync between my devices always bothered me.

There are some commercial providers like feedly that enable you to sync your feeds between your devices but I did not like the fact that I would have to hand over my reading habits.

About two years ago a came across Tiny Tiny RSS.

“Tiny Tiny RSS is a free and open source web-based news feed (RSS/Atom) reader and aggregator.¹”

Tiny Tiny RSS enables you to sync, share and filter RSS/Atom feeds including Podcasts. The project is powered by PHP and relies on a PostgresSQL (or MariaDB) database. For Android there is also an official App available on F-droid. Sadly there is currently no official iOS App available.

Installation

Tiny Tiny RSS is meant to be self-hosted. To simplify the installation, the developers of Tiny Tiny RSS are providing a docker-compose.yml. All you need to do is install Docker² and docker-compose on your server. On Debian based System you can install Docker and docker-compose via the package manager as follows.

$ sudo apt-get install docker docker-compose

To start the tt-rss server all you need to do is to start the docker containers.

$ docker-compose up

This command will create different containers containing the PostgreSQL database and the web-application. The web-application will be exposed on port 8280 per default. You can now check your tt-rss instance in your browser on localhost:8280/tt-rss/

If you want to try Tiny Tiny RSS without installing anything you can check on the demo instance of Tiny Tiny RSS provided by the developers using demo, demo as login.

For my personal setup I am using nginx as reverse proxy to increase security using http basic auth.

First impressions

My first impressions are very good. There were no issues while installing Tiny Tiny RSS and everything is running smoothly. One “downside” could be that the amount of possible configurations can be a little overwhelming.

When I tried to use the android app for the fist time I was not able to log into my tt-rss instance because I had to enable API usage for my account. After that I was able to login and sync my feeds with the server without any further problems.

Unlike Flym Tiny Tiny RSS for android seems not to send any notifications when there are fresh articles in you feed (or I was just to stupid to figure out how to enable them ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ). Maybe that’s a good thing. All these notifications were quite disturbing from time to time but I never managed to turn them of.