Hosting FreshRSS on Fly.io

Oct 11, 2023

RSS is a great way to follow websites that publish content via blog posts, new articles, or other syndicated media. A RSS reader that is out there is called FreshRSS and can easily installed via self-hosted options or on the public cloud providers.

Fly.io is also a great service that allows you to have a few applications for free, for testing or small containers. Check out what else their free tier has to offer.

Getting started

Sign up for Fly.io or sign-in
Install flyctl
Sign into your account: flyctl auth login
Create a volume for persisting data using the command fly volumes create freshrss_data --size 1
- In this command, we create a volume of size 1GB. This can be increased later if needed, but so far, FreshRSS has archive abilities and more and I haven't needed to expand this yet with the number of feeds and posts that I am following.
Create a fly.toml file
- update a few of the user specific items like the app name. This becomes your subdomain on your appname.fly.dev url once built
Save the fly.toml file. From the same directory where fly.toml is present, deploy FreshRSS the application using fly launch. Fly.io will pull the Docker image and launch the VM.

Sample fly.toml file

app = "freshrss" # Change this, should be unique
kill_signal = "SIGINT"
kill_timeout = 5
processes = []

[build]
  image = "freshrss/freshrss:1.20.1"

[env]
  CRON_MIN='*/20'

[mounts]
  source="freshrss_data"
  destination="/var/www/FreshRSS/data"

[experimental]
  allowed_public_ports = []
  auto_rollback = true

[[services]]
  http_checks = []
  internal_port = 80
  processes = ["app"]
  protocol = "tcp"
  script_checks = []
  [services.concurrency]
    hard_limit = 25
    soft_limit = 20
    type = "connections"

  [[services.ports]]
    force_https = true
    handlers = ["http"]
    port = 80

  [[services.ports]]
    handlers = ["tls", "http"]
    port = 443

  [[services.tcp_checks]]
    grace_period = "1s"
    interval = "15s"
    restart_limit = 0
    timeout = "2s"

Updating FreshRSS on Fly.io

Updating is still pretty easy as well. When I saw how to do this, FreshRSS was on version 1.20.1. Looking at the latest release on GitHub, it is now at 1.21.0. We just need to update one line in our fly.toml file and re-launch the app fly launch. This will download the specified version, rebuild the container, and redeploy the application.

[build]
  image = "freshrss/freshrss:1.21.0"

Start reading

Once the deployment is successful, you'll be able to access the site from appname.fly.dev, or what you updated app to in the fly.toml file. You can use this domain, or also create a custom certificate, and subdomain on a domain you already own. You can read more at their documentation for Custom Domains and SSL Certificates.

The setup is pretty straight forward from here. First you'll be creating your account in a single-user mode and begin importing your RSS feeds.

Happy reading!

I'm publishing this as part of 100 Days To Offload. You can join in yourself by visiting 100DaysToOffload.com.

Hosting FreshRSS on Fly.io

Getting started

Updating FreshRSS on Fly.io

Start reading

Webmentions & Replies