Adding a feed

  1. To add a feed, copy the URL of its RSS or Atom file (for instance, the Framablog RSS URL is https://framablog.org/feed/). FreshRSS is able to automatically find the address of the feed for websites that are declaring it in a standard way.
  2. In FreshRSS, click the “+” button next to “Subscriptions management”.
  3. Paste the URL in the “Feed URL” field.
  4. (optional): You can select the category for your feed. By default, it will be in “Uncategorized”.
  5. (optional): If the subscription requires credentials, you can enter them in the “HTTP username” and “HTTP password” fields.
  6. (optional): You can set a timeout for the feed request.
  7. (optional): You can choose to ignore SSL certificate errors (such as with self-signed certificates) by setting “Verify SSL security” to “No”. This is not recommended, and it is better to either add the root certificate to the FreshRSS server or to fix the SSL certificate problems on the feed hosting server.

Subscription management

The “Subscription management” submenu allows categories and feeds to be configured. Feeds can be moved between categories by drag-and-drop, or in the individual feed’s settings. Hovering over a feed/category will cause a gear icon to appear. Clicking the icon will bring up the settings for that item.

Category Settings

Information

Archiving

If “Purge Policy” has “By default” selected, then the default purge policy is used and the other options are not displayed. Category options will override the default policy, but they will not override feed-specific options.

Feed Settings

These fields will be auto-filled when adding a feed, but they can be modified later. Visibility will define if the feed is displayed in the main feed, only in specific categories, or not at all.

Archival

This section will let you override the default settings for feed archiving and update frequency.

Login

Some feeds require a username/password submitted over HTTP. These usually aren’t needed for feeds.

Advanced

Retrieve a truncated feed from within FreshRSS

This question comes up regularly, so we’ll try to clarify how one can retrieve a truncated RSS feed with FreshRSS. Please note that the process is absolutely not user friendly, but it works. :)

Please be aware that this way you’ll generate much more traffic to the originating sites, and they might block you accordingly. FreshRSS performance is also negatively affected, because you’ll have to fetch the full article content one by one. So it’s a feature to use sparingly!

The “Article CSS selector on original website” corresponds to the “path” consisting of IDs and classes (which in HTML, matches the id and class attributes) to retrieve only the interesting part that corresponds to the article. Ideally, this path starts with an id (which is unique to the page). The basics are explained here.

Example: Rue89

To find this path, you have to go to the address of one of the truncated articles. You look have to look for the “block” of HTML that corresponds to article content (in the source code!).

Here we find that the block that encompasses nothing but the content of the article is <div class="content clearfix">. We’ll only use the .content class here. Nevertheless, as said above, it’s best to start the path with an id. If we go back to the parent block, we find <div id="article"> and that’s perfect! The path will be #article .content.

Add the corresponding classes to the article CSS path on the feed configuration page

Examples:

Combining CSS Classes

Let’s say we have an article which contains ads, and we do not want to have those ads retrieved by FreshRSS. Example HTML:

<div id="article">
<h2>wanted</h2>
<p class="content">wanted content</p>
<p class="ad">unwanted content</p>
<h2>wanted</h2>
<p class="content">wanted content</p>
<h2>wanted</h2>
<p class="ad">unwanted content</p>
<p class="content">wanted content</p>
</div>

In this case it’s possible to combine multiple CSS selectors with a comma: #article p.content, #article h2

Retrieve a truncated feed with external tools

Complementary tools can be used to retrieve full article content, such as:

Filter

Articles can be automatically marked as read based on some search terms. See filtering for more information on how to create these filters.

Import / export

See SQLite export/import as an alternative.

Export

  1. To export your list of feeds, go to “Subscriptions management”.
  2. Click on “Import / export”
  3. You can select for your export:
    1. the list of feeds
    2. labelled articles
    3. favourite articles
    4. and finally, you can select feeds you want to export (by default, all feeds are selected)
  4. Click on “export”.

Import

  1. Go to the page “Import / export”.
  2. Click on “Browse” and select your OPML or archive file on your computer.
  3. Click on “Import”

Important: you can not import directly a list of feeds from a text file. You need to convert it beforehand to OPML. Here is some tools you could use :

Use bookmarklet

Bookmarklets are little scripts that you can execute to perform various tasks. FreshRSS offers a bookmarklet for subscribing to newsfeeds.

  1. Open “Subscriptions management”.
  2. Click on “Subscription tools”.
  3. Drag the “Subscribe” button to your bookmark toolbar or right click and choose your browser’s “Bookmark link” action.