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Installing Miniflux on FreeBSD

Categories admin Tags miniflux lighttpd postgres freebsd

I don’t use RSS readers much these days, not since Google killed Reader. However, I missed having a way to subscribe to blogs and be able to keep tabs on what’s going on. Somewhere I came across miniflux and I liked it’s style and minimal and responsive design.

I decided it would be good to host this on my Digital Ocean droplet that’s hosting this site, since I don’t really want to host anything public from my home network. Also, the blog doesn’t get much (any? its ok) traffic so that should be no issue.

Create Sub-domian

First step was to setup a subdomain to access it from. I went to the Digital Ocean control panel and created a new A record for the subdomain (rdr.jmmr.dev) pointing to my droplet. Often this is easier to manage when setting up a reverse proxy, but it does look like miniflux can handle it. Even so, I hadn’t used lighttpd as a reverse proxy before, so I’d prefer to keep it simple. In hindsight, this probably would have been fine.

Install Postgres

Miniflux uses postgres, so I installed the postgres packages required. Miniflux does need the hstore extension which is in the contrib package and won’t be in most “postgres install” references, so don’t forget that one. I first searched pkg for the postgresql13 packages (latest stable version)

pkg search postgresql13

pgtcl-postgresql13-2.1.1_2     TCL extension for accessing a PostgreSQL server (PGTCL-NG)
postgresql13-client-13.3       PostgreSQL database (client)
postgresql13-contrib-13.3      The contrib utilities from the PostgreSQL distribution
postgresql13-docs-13.3         The PostgreSQL documentation set
postgresql13-plperl-13.3       Write SQL functions for PostgreSQL using Perl5
postgresql13-plpython-13.3     Module for using Python to write SQL functions
postgresql13-pltcl-13.3        Module for using Tcl to write SQL functions
postgresql13-server-13.3_1     PostgreSQL is the most advanced open-source database available anywhere

I installed the three required packages miniflux needs for postgres

sudo pkg install postgresql13-server-13.3_1 postgresql13-contrib-13.3 postgresql13.3

Next I initialized postgres…

sudo /usr/local/etc/rc.d/postgresql initdb

…and configured it to start automatically…

sudo sysrc postgresql_enable=YES

… and finally started it

sudo service postgresql start

Install miniflux and configure DB

And then installed miniflux (this probably can be done at the same time as postgres)

sudo pkg install miniflux-2.0.32

Error for some reason, I caught an error that the “pw: user ‘miniflux’ disappeared during update”, after some research, I found the pw db needed to be sync’d with the following command.

sudo pwd_mkdb -p /etc/master.passwd

After this, I re-ran the pkg install for miniflux and there was no error.

Following the database configuration instructions for miniflux.

su - postgres

createuser -P miniflux
Enter password for new role: ******
Enter it again: ******

createdb -O miniflux miniflux

psql miniflux -c 'create extension hstore'
CREATE EXTENSION

There are a couple of options to add the enable the HSTORE extension, I went with the route of temporarily granting SUPERUSER permissions to the miniflux user.

Remember to change this back after running migrations

ALTER USER miniflux WITH SUPERUSER;

Next I added the database and base url params in the miniflux config file at /usr/local/etc/miniflux.env. This is the file automatically passed to miniflux when starting via init.

DATABASE_URL=dbname=miniflux sslmode=disable user=miniflux password=THE_PASSWORD
BASE_URL=https://rdr.jmmr.dev
LISTEN_ADDR=0.0.0.0:8080

Then run the migrations to setup the database, pointing it to the config file so it can get the DATABASE_URL.

miniflux -c /usr/local/etc/miniflux.env -migrate

Important - revoke SUPERUSER permissions from miniflux user, if you granted them

Switch to the postgres user and disable SUPERUSER for miniflux user

su - postgres
psql ALTER USER miniflux WITH NOSUPERUSER;

Switch back to your user account

And create an admin user

miniflux -c /usr/local/etc/miniflux.env -create-admin

At this point, miniflux should be good to go, so I enabled it to start automatically and started it up.

sudo sysrc enable_miniflux=YES
sudo service miniflux start

Configure lighttpd to reverse proxy requests to miniflux

Lighttpd is already running this blog on jmmr.dev, so I needed to proxy request for rdr.jmmr.dev to miniflux. Lighttpd has mod_proxy for this task.

First I enabled mod_proxy in the config file (/usr/local/etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf)

server.modules += ( "mod_proxy" )

And then configured to proxy based on the host header to miniflux.

#######################################################################
##
## mod_proxy
## Proxy Configuration
##
##
$HTTP["host"] == "rdr.jmmr.dev" {
  proxy.server = ("" =>
    (
      (
        "host" => "127.0.0.1",
        "port" => "8080"
      )
    )
  )
}

And finally restarted lighttpd to pick up the new config.

sudo service lighttpd restart

Let’s Encrypt

Next I needed to update my LE cert to also be valid for the new subdomain. Let’s encrypt has a handy command, expand, to add an additional DNS name to an existing configuration.

certbot --expand -d jmmr.dev,rdr.jmmr.dev

At this point, certbot had generated a new cert, and lighttpd needs a restart to pick it up.

sudo service lighttpd restart

Final setup

Miniflux was now being served up via https. I logged in with the admin user and created a non-admin user for myself. I then imported an OPML feed I had backed up from Google Reader.

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