rss-to-homeassistant

README

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Pushes RSS feeds into Home Assistant as Markdown, so they can be displayed natively.

For more background, see my blog post.

Prerequisites

• Home Assistant
• Home Assistant needs to be connected to a MQTT server
• This software

Configuration

You need to create config.json:

{
	"mqtt": {
		"address": "127.0.0.1:1883",
		"credentials": {
			"username": "AzureDiamond",
			"password": "hunter2"
		}
	},
	"rss_feeds": [
		{
			"id": "skrolli",
			"url": "https://skrolli.fi/feed/"
		}
	]
}

If you don't use MQTT username/password, you can remove the whole "credentials": {...} section.

How to use

You can run this on any computer as long as it can connect to the same MQTT server that Home Assistant uses.

For example, make a directory /home/<username>/rss-to-homeassistant.

Download a suitable binary there (for Raspberry Pi, use the ARM build, for PCs use the amd64 build).

You can rename the downloaded binary to rss-to-homeassistant.

You've created the configuration file. The directory has these contents:

/home/pi/rss-to-homeassistant
├── config.json
└── rss-to-homeassistant

Test starting it manually. If everything goes well, you should see this message:

$ ./rss-to-homeassistant
2021/03/22 07:45:30 [INFO] skrolli changed

You can stop it with Ctrl + c.

The RSS feed should've just popped into Home Assistant (because we use its autodiscovery mechanism to advertise the feeds):

This means that Home Assistant has the Markdown content of the RSS feed. We're close to the finish line.

Displaying the feed's Markdown content

You need to add a Markdown card, with content that has a dynamic placeholder to display the feed entity's Markdown content:

You're done!

Keep this running across system restarts

If you're on Linux, we have a helper to integrate with systemd:

./rss-to-homeassistant install-as-service
Wrote unit file to /etc/systemd/system/rss-to-homeassistant.service
Run to enable on boot & to start (--)now:
	$ systemctl enable --now rss-to-homeassistant
Verify successful start:
	$ systemctl status rss-to-homeassistant

If you followed the tips the installer gave, this program should automatically start after reboots. Have fun! Enjoy life.

TODO

• Consider polling interval, 1 minute might be too often
• Implement HTTP caching to be nice to RSS publishers