λleph

Copyright © 2016 Drew Thoreson

λleph is a feed aggregator (RSS/Atom) daemon with an HTTP interface, designed with extensibility in mind.

λleph is not yet in a ready-to-use state. Most of the basic features are working in the back-end, but the provided client is woefully incomplete and there are many important and not-so-important features still to be added to the server.

Technical Info

λleph is written in Common Lisp. Currently it will only run on SBCL, as it uses some extensions provided by that implementation. This may change in the future. It should run on any POSIX system supported by SBCL.

λleph communicates with clients via a RESTful API. Some URLs of interest:

• /feeds
• /feeds/{id}
• /feeds/{id}?format=raw
• /feeds/{id}/items
• /feeds/{id}/update
• /feeds/{id}/mark-read
• /items
• /items/{id}
• /items/{id}?format=raw
• /items/{id}/mark-read

The server responds to requests by sending back JSON data representing the requested resource.

λleph's policy on metadata is to store everything, even if it doesn't understand what the data means. This allows clients to be as smart or as dumb as they want to be when presenting the data to the user.

By default, only the metadata that is meaningful to λleph is sent to clients. In order to access the full range of feed or item metadata, clients can add "format=raw" to the query string when requesting a feed or item resource.

Requirements

λleph requires PostgreSQL and a few Common Lisp libraries. Quicklisp is used to install/load the required CL libraries. You will have to install and configure PostgreSQL yourself.

Configuration

λleph reads configuration settings from the file "rc.lisp" in the project's root directory. Settings are organized as a hierarchy of association lists. E.g.

((:database
   (:name . "mydb")
   (:user . "me")
   (:pass . "mypass")
   (:host . "127.0.0.1"))
 (:server
   (:port . 80)
   (:document-root "www/")))

You will have to at least configure the database settings, unless you've opted to use the default name/user/pass of "aleph" when setting up Postgres. The default port for the HTTP server is 8080.

Running

$ sbcl --load run.lisp

Git Repository

https://github.com/drewt/aleph

$ git clone https://github.com/drewt/aleph.git