I’ve recently installed tinytinyrss and wallabag on this server (I’m not sharing the links with you; they’re for me!) and it mostly went pretty well – just some permissions-changing, really. Of course, it took me the better part of four hours to install wallabag, but it turned out after all of that it was because I made a typo in the name of my database: it’s called personal.db but I had it in parameters.yml as personal.sql. I only cried a little bit!

Now that I’ve recovered from the trauma, here’s some instructions to get them running on your own NFSN instance. I’m writing these down because there was scant information online already about setting them up, and for a newbie like me, it would’ve been very useful.¹

Pre-installation

Before installing either of these applications on your little slice of Internet, you’ll need to enable MySQL if you haven’t already. To do that, sign in to NFSN and click the mysql tab. On the sidebar, click Create a New MySQL Process and choose what you want in the options (I picked the default, MariaDB 10.2 + InnoDB), and click Create New Process. The first MySQL process on NFSN is free (outside the resource and storage costs, of course). I was able to put both of these services in one database, so one should be plenty unless maybe you’re planning on having a public instance of either of these.

Once you create the database, you’ll get an email from NFSN about your new instance. Follow the instructions to change your admin password and create a new user for you. You can find the phpMyAdmin at https://phpmyadmin.nearlyfreespeech.net. Once all that’s done, you’re ready to install other stuff!²

Installing tinytinyrss

If you don’t know,

Tiny Tiny RSS is an open source web-based news feed (RSS/Atom) reader and aggregator, designed to allow you to read news from any location, while feeling as close to a real desktop application as possible. – tt-rss.org

It’s basically Google Reader or Feedly or whatever, but self-hosted. I compare it to Google Reader because most sites I read to figure out how to set it up did, and I think they did because they wrote them around the time that Google stopped Reader as a service, and I think the reason why there’s no newer information is because people, as a whole, don’t really use RSS anymore. They use Facebook feeds and Reddit and all that business (I was thinking about using tt-rss to collect my Facebook notifications off-site to read at my leisure, but alas, they disabled that feature in 2013). However, I like RSS feeds (by the way, you can subscribe to my feed here, if you want) because it collects my sources that I’m interested in into one spot for easy reading. So here’s the instructions (great thanks, if they need it, to Nomad Physicist and robinadr – I read them to figure this out, and of course you’ll want to reference the official documentation):

Download

First, you need to get the tt-rss source, so you’ll need git. NFSN already has git installed, but the entire repo’s history is quite large and I didn’t want to pay for NFSN to host it all, so I cloned it on my home computer and used scp to copy everything besides .git to the server. Here’s the basic steps:

git clone https://tt-rss.org/git/tt-rss.git tt-rss
cd tt-rss
for file in *; do scp "${file}" <nsfnuser>@<nsfnhost>:/home/public/tt-rss; done

Install

Once you have everything copied over, you’ll need to set up your database to handle tinytinyrss. Head over to https://phpmyadmin.nearlyfreespeech.net and sign in to your database. Click the User accounts tab and click Add user account. I used tinytinyrss as the username and generated a password. (Keep the Host name field the same.) Check the Create database with same name and grant all priveleges, scroll down to the bottom, and click Go. You can close the page after that.

Now, you should be able to navigate to <your-site>/tt-rss/install and follow the instructions there. The rest of the setup is detailed on tt-rss.org, it’s really pretty easy. Really, setting up Tiny Tiny RSS was not the reason I wrote this post; now that I’m done with this section I’m not sure if I should’ve written it at all – it’s that easy.

Afterward

After you’re finished installing, the last thing you’ll need to do is set up a cron job with NFSN to run the update script every hour (I also created a new user to aggregate feeds under, but I’ll leave that as an exercise). Head over to your nearlyfreespeech member panel and select your site in the sites tab. On the sidebar you’ll find a link to Manage Scheduled Tasks; click it and Add /usr/local/bin/php /home/public/tt-rss/update.php --feeds --quiet (as user web, in the ssh environment) every hour, or as often as you want — though I don’t think you’ll get much use out of updating less frequently than a day. If you want to update your feeds right away (which you’ll need to do whenever you add a feed if you don’t want to wait for the hour), ssh into your site and run the same command.

Installing wallabag

Wallabag is a Read-it-Later bookmark service, like Pocket or Instapaper, but again, it’s self hosted (technically they do have a hosted instance at https://wallabag.it, but it costs money). I have been using Pocket, but since I have this site now and wanted a project, I set up a wallabag instance. It was a little harder to set up because the documentation is not nearly as good as tt-rss, but here’s what I did. The manual can be read online, for what it’s worth, but like I said, it’s not very comprehensive.

Download

You want to use the directions from the [On shared hosting] section of the install guide, since that’s what NFSN is. Basically, you’ll

wget https://wllbg.org/latest-v2-package && tar xvf latest-v2-package

in an ssh to your server, then rename the resulting folder to whatever you want the installation to be. I used walla because wallabag is too long to type. You can delete the latest-v2-package tarball.

Install

You’ll need to create another user and database for your MySQL database for wallabag; it’s basically the same instructions as for tt-rss, except you substitute ‘wallabag’ for ‘tinytinyrss’.

In your wallabag installation folder, edit app/config/parameters.yml with your database configuration. It should look something like this³:

parameters:
    database_driver: pdo_mysql
    database_driver_class: null
    database_host: <database>
    database_port: null
    database_name: wallabag
    database_user: wallabag
    database_password: <password>
    database_path: null
    database_table_prefix: wallabag_
    database_socket: null
    database_charset: utf8mb4
    domain_name: '<domain>/web'

If you don’t want to run a public instance of wallabag, you’ll need to include fosuser_registration: false in parameters.yml as well. It’s on by default.

Once your configuration looks alright, run the following commands and navigate to your site.

bin/console --env=prod cache:clear
chgrp -R web var

You need to chgrp because you’ll get a permissions error on the server if the files in var/ aren’t in the web group.

It should work! If not, keep tweaking and twiddling for four hours or so until you realize that a typo is keeping it from working (if you’re like me).

Afterward

I created a new user for myself and began importing articles from Pocket right away. It worked okay until it didn’t, but I didn’t want to do all the troubleshooting when most of my Pocket articles are old anyway and not very read-it-later-able, as well (I threw a lot of videos and Hacker News comment threads in there for a while). I also installed the Android app and Firefox extension without much fuss at all – the instructions for installing those are more helpful.

One more thing you might want to do on Firefox is disable the built-in Pocket extension. Head over to about:config and change extensions.pocket.enabled to false.

Conclusion

It really wasn’t as hard as I thought it’d be to run my own instances of these applications, and I don’t think it’ll be very expensive either! It’s nice to know that if I do change my mind, it’s pretty simple to delete the whole thing or shut it down myself. My data is mine, for once.