newsdash

A news dashboard inspired by iGoogle and Netvibes

Features • Motivation • Installation • Development • Credits • License

⭐ Features

• Customizable grid-based dashboard
• Support for Atom and RSS feeds
• 4 different feed layouts: condensed, list, detailed, tiles
• Tabbed multi-feeds
• Import/Export of settings and feeds
• Filter feed items
• Clean and simple design
• Carefully handcrafted

🤔 Motivation

I couldn't find a modern and simple web-based feed reader that meets my requirements. So I wrote my own.

💻 Installation Docker

To get you up and running start the Docker image. You can then access the web app at http://localhost:3001/.

$ docker run \
    -e REDIS_URL=redis://redis:6380 \
    -p 127.0.0.1:3001:3001 \
    newsdash/newsdash

To persist your settings and feeds you need to provide a Redis instance. You can start a Redis container and link it to newsdash. Docker Compose works great for small setups. Use the environment variable REDIS_URL to customize the connection URL. It's possible to run without Redis in API-less mode.

nginx

For a production deployment you should use some sort of reverse proxy like nginx. This way you can add things like basic authentication, gzip compression and TLS termination. nginx is also much better at serving the static files. The container exports the minified production build in the volume /newsdash/client.

A sample nginx configuration snippet you can start from.

server {
  listen 443 ssl http2;
  server_name newsdash.example.com;
  root /path/to/newsdash-client;


ssl on;
  ssl_certificate [...];

auth_basic "Restricted";
  auth_basic_user_file htpasswd_file;

gzip on;
  gzip_min_length 500;
  gzip_proxied any;
  gzip_types
    text/css
    text/xml
    application/atom+xml
    application/javascript
    application/manifest+json
    application/rdf+xml
    application/rss+xml
    application/xml;

location /api/ {
    proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $remote_addr;
    proxy_set_header Host $http_host;
    proxy_pass http://localhost:3001;
  }

location / {
    try_files $uri $uri/index.html =404;
  }
}

It's possible to run newsdash without the API part.

The upside is, it's easy to deploy. You just have to upload a bunch of static files. Grab the dist package and unzip it to a folder on your webserver.

The web app will detect that it doesn't have access to the API and runs in fallback mode. It will be fully functional although some limitations apply.

• Feeds are fetched using a public CORS proxy.
• Images are only present if the feed has image URLs included. Usually they come in low resolution.
• All settings and feeds are stored locally in your browser. You need to transfer them manually to another computer using the import/export function.

🛠️ Development

Make sure you have recent versions of Node.js and Yarn installed.

Check out the project and start a development server.

$ git clone https://github.com/buzz/newsdash.git
$ cd newsdash
$ yarn install
$ yarn client:dev
$ yarn server:dev

Kudos to Netvibes and defunct iGoogle. That's where this project drew its inspiration.

The following packages are used:

• Babel
• Font Awesome
• Node.js
• PostCSS
• React-Grid-Layout
• React
• Redux
• rss-parser
• webpack
• and many more…

License

GNU Affero General Public License v3.0