CommaFeed is a lightweight, self-hosted alternative to Google Reader. I was looking for a self-hosted solution since The Old Reader became way too slow to be usable and CommaFeed fits the bill nicely.
Note: This post assumes you want to access CommaFeed from a subdomain (i.e commafeed.example.com), if you don’t want that, follow the guide and do the extra steps at the end of this post.
Here are the – surprisingly few – steps you need to follow to install it on an Arch Linux server:
$ pacman -S maven $ packer -S jdk #(You can use other AUR helpers, or simply download the tarball from AUR). $ git clone https://github.com/Athou/commafeed.git $ cd commafeed $ mvn clean package tomee:build -Pprod -Pmysql
If this is the first time you are building CommaFeed, this will take a little while as maven will fetch a lot of build dependencies. After the compilation is finished, do the following – as root – in the build directory:
# mkdir /opt/commafeed # mv target/commafeed.zip /opt/commafeed # cd /opt/commafeed && unzip commafeed.zip # mv webapps/commafeed.war webapps/ROOT.war
Now, open conf/tomee.xml
and set your MySQL connection credentials.
Finally, mark the binaries as executable with:
# chmod +x bin/*.sh
At this point, you can access CommaFeed on the default port (8082) but let’s configure a reverse proxy so we can access it on port 80 without affecting other applications on that port.
In your VirtualHosts configuration, add the following (replacing example.com
with your domain):
NameVirtualHost *:80 <VirtualHost *> ServerAdmin me@example.com ServerName commafeed.example.com ProxyPreserveHost On # setup the proxy <Proxy *> Order allow,deny Allow from all </Proxy> ProxyPass / http://localhost:8082/ ProxyPassReverse / http://localhost:8082/ </VirtualHost>
You are almost ready!
Open up the MySQL database you have created for CommaFeed and run the following query:
UPDATE APPLICATIONSETTINGS SET publicUrl = 'http://commafeed.example.com/';
Now, we can finally start the application:
# sh /opt/commafeed/bin/startup.sh
That’s it! You should now be able to access CommaFeed by visiting http://commafeed.example.com!
If you ever need to stop the server, you can simply run:
# sh /opt/commafeed/bin/shutdown.sh
Enjoy 🙂 Feel free to ask any questions in the comments.
P.S: If you don’t want to install to a subdomain, here’s what to do. Let’s assume you want CommaFeed to be accessed via http://example.com/commafeed.
# mv /opt/commafeed/webapps/ROOT.war /opt/commafeed/webapps/commafeed.war
In your Apache VirtualHost config, find the following lines:
ProxyPass / http://localhost:8082/ ProxyPassReverse / http://localhost:8082/
and replace them with:
ProxyPass /commafeed/ http://localhost:8082/commafeed/ ProxyPassReverse /commafeed/ http://localhost:8082/commafeed/
Now, run the following SQL query in your CommaFeed database:
UPDATE APPLICATIONSETTINGS SET publicUrl = 'http://example.com/commafeed/';
Finally, restart the application:
# sh /opt/commafeed/bin/shutdown.sh # sh /opt/commafeed/bin/startup.sh
… and voila! You are all set 🙂