FFR: Feed to Fediverse Router

Routes news articles to Fediverse communities. FFR polls a set of sources, extracts each article, and posts it to the Lemmy communities you map it to, either automatically or after you approve it.

It is meant to run unattended on your own server: point it at a source, map that source to a community, and let it publish on a schedule you control.

Screenshots

The dashboard, showing article volume over a selected range, approval and publish success rates, and per-feed breakdowns.

The review queue. Each row is one feed and community pairing, grouped by feed, with the routing shown above the headline.

Features

• Article routing: map each source to one or more Lemmy communities, with optional keyword filtering
• Approval workflow: review articles before they publish, or let them go out automatically
• Publishing controls: a global interval and an optional daily cap, so a source returning a large batch cannot flood a community
• Dashboard: articles fetched and published over time, approval and publish success rates, and per-source and per-community breakdowns
• Activity log: a chronological record of what the automation has done
• Health checks: warnings for sources that stop producing articles and for platform credentials that stop working
• Dark theme
• Single container: FrankenPHP serves the app, with MariaDB and Redis alongside

Sources and platforms

FFR ships with parsers for three sources:

Source	Type
VRT News	Website
Belga	Website
The Guardian	RSS

Some sources publish a usable feed and some do not, so a source is either read from RSS or scraped from its pages. Either way a parser handles it, registered in config/feed.php.

Adding a source means implementing ArticleParserInterface (three methods: canParse, extractData, getSourceName) and registering it. See CONTRIBUTING.md.

Lemmy is currently the only supported platform.

Self-hosting

Images are published to forge.lvl0.xyz/lvl0/fedi-feed-router. The example below pins a release tag; check Releases for the current one, and the CHANGELOG before upgrading.

docker-compose.yml

services:
  app:
    image: forge.lvl0.xyz/lvl0/fedi-feed-router:v1.4.1
    container_name: ffr_app
    restart: always
    ports:
      - "8000:8000"
    environment:
      APP_KEY: "${APP_KEY}"
      APP_URL: "${APP_URL}"
      DB_DATABASE: "${DB_DATABASE}"
      DB_USERNAME: "${DB_USERNAME}"
      DB_PASSWORD: "${DB_PASSWORD}"
      REDIS_HOST: redis
      REDIS_PORT: 6379
    volumes:
      - app_storage:/app/storage
    depends_on:
      - db
      - redis
    healthcheck:
      test: ["CMD", "curl", "-f", "http://localhost:8000/up"]
      interval: 30s
      timeout: 10s
      retries: 3
      start_period: 40s

  db:
    image: mariadb:11
    container_name: ffr_db
    restart: always
    environment:
      MYSQL_DATABASE: "${DB_DATABASE}"
      MYSQL_USER: "${DB_USERNAME}"
      MYSQL_PASSWORD: "${DB_PASSWORD}"
      MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD: "${DB_ROOT_PASSWORD}"
    volumes:
      - db_data:/var/lib/mysql

  redis:
    image: redis:7-alpine
    container_name: ffr_redis
    restart: always
    volumes:
      - redis_data:/data

volumes:
  db_data:
  redis_data:
  app_storage:

Environment variables

Variable	Required	Description
APP_KEY	Yes	Encryption key. Generate with: echo "base64:$(openssl rand -base64 32)"
APP_URL	Yes	Your domain (e.g. https://ffr.example.com)
DB_DATABASE	Yes	Database name
DB_USERNAME	Yes	Database user
DB_PASSWORD	Yes	Database password
DB_ROOT_PASSWORD	Yes	MariaDB root password

Usage

On first run FFR walks you through onboarding. After that:

1. Add a channel on the Channels page. A channel is a Lemmy community on a given instance, together with the account that posts to it. The community is picked from the instance, so a typo cannot create a channel that fails later.
2. Add a feed on the Feeds page, choosing one of the supported sources.
3. Add a route on the Routes page, mapping a feed to a channel. Keywords on a route restrict it to articles that match.

Articles are then discovered on a schedule. Each one becomes a row per matching route, so an article routed to three communities is three separate decisions. Approve one on the Articles page and it publishes to that route's community; publishing failures come back to you on the Failed tab rather than retrying silently.

Publishing runs every five minutes, one article per run, bounded by the daily cap if you set one.

Development

NixOS / Nix

git clone https://forge.lvl0.xyz/lvl0/fedi-feed-router.git
cd fedi-feed-router
nix-shell

The shell prints the available commands and can start the containers for you.

Command	Description
dev-up	Start the development environment
dev-down	Stop the development environment
dev-restart	Restart the containers
dev-rebuild	Rebuild the images
dev-shell	Enter the app container
dev-artisan <cmd>	Run an artisan command
dev-logs	Follow the application log
dev-logs-db	Follow the database log

Service	URL
App	http://localhost:8000
Vite	http://localhost:5173
MariaDB	localhost:3307
Redis	localhost:6380

Other platforms

Contributions welcome for development setup instructions on other platforms.

Contributing

Issues and pull requests are welcome. See CONTRIBUTING.md for the development setup, the checks that run in CI, and the commit conventions.

For bugs and questions, use Issues.

Note on AI assistance

This project was developed with AI assistance.

License

FFR is free software, licensed under the GNU AGPL-3.0.