fern

README

fern

A simple media feed downloader.

Install it with:

go install ricketyspace.net/fern@latest

Documentation

Overview

fern is a simple media feed downloader.

It depends on yt-dlp to download the media found in the media feeds to your computer.

fern currently supports YoutTube, NPR, and Podcast feeds.

Information about what media feeds to download, the location of yt-dlp program on your computer, and the directory where the media should be downloaded to must be specified in a config file which fern expects to be at $HOME/.config/fern/fern.json

fern's config file contains three fields:

{
   "ydl-path": "/usr/local/bin/yt-dlp",
   "dump-dir": "~/media/feeds", // media feed download directory
   "feeds": [...] // list of media feeds.
}

Each item in the media "feeds" must be:

{
   "id": "media-feed-id", // unique identifier for the media feed
   "source": "https://feeds.npr.org/XXXX/rss.xml", // media feed url
   "schema": "npr", // must be "youtube" or "npr" or "podcast"
   "last": 5, // the last N items that should be downloaded
   "title-contains": "tiny desk", // optional. if specified, downloads entries with title matching the value of this field
   "ignore-shorts": true, // optional. applicable to only youtube feeds. if set, will ignore youtube shorts.
   "ignore-titles": ["#ad"] // optional. applicable to only youtube feeds. if set, will ignore entries with title containing any of the values (case-insensitive) in this list.
}

You may download an example config file for fern from https://ricketyspace.net/fern/fern.json

Run fern with:

$ fern -run

To print fern's version, do:

$ fern -version