I’ve been looking for a free option for instant RSS to email subscriptions, and while Zapier comes close; the free tier does not support the volume or speed that I require.

That’s why I mocked up Sangh. Using Sangh with Gmail’s Filters allows you to have a powerful and well-regulated inbox with a real-time subscription to whatever feeds you want to follow.

1. Formatting RSS

The rss-parser looks to be a solid bet in terms of simplicity.

I grab the 3 latest entries from the feed and pass them to the parsing function which returns content in an object that can be consumed by nodemailer that we’ll set up later. The formatEntry function is where you’ll make changes and perform string interpolation to fit your content.

const formatEntry = entry => ({  
  to: TO_EMAIL,
  subject: `${ entry.title }`,
  html: `${ entry.content }`
})

parser.parseURL(RSS_URL, (err, parsed) => {  
  let entries = parsed.feed.entries.splice(0, 3) // only latest 3

  for (entry of entries) {
    sendEmail(formatEntry(entry))
  }
})

2. Configuring sendmail

I’m hosting things on a $5 DO droplet which I’ve configured with Postfix and can use sendmail on, which makes it really easy to use Nodemailer‘s sendmail transport.

const nodemailer = require('nodemailer')

const transporter = nodemailer.createTransport({  
  sendmail: true,
  newline: 'windows',
  path: '/usr/sbin/sendmail'
})

3. Preventing repeats

Now here’s the challenge — we need to ensure that no repeat emails are sent to us in case the RSS feed doesn’t actually update. I solved this with a simple sqlite database that records RSS item’s ID and doesn’t send out the email if it’s already sent.

I use Sequelize + sqlite here. An ORM just makes simple read/write operations easier, and sqlite‘s flat file datbase is perfect for this approach.

Initialize the database like so:

const Sequelize = require('sequelize')

const sequelize = new Sequelize({  
  host: 'localhost',
  dialect: 'sqlite',
  storage: './posts.sqlite'
})

const Post = sequelize.define('post', {  
  id: {
    type: Sequelize.STRING,
    notNull: true,
    primaryKey: true
  }
}, {
  timestamps: false
})

Post.sync()

We then need to modify our ‘parser’ function to check if post already exists in the DB or not.

parser.parseURL(RSS_URL, async (err, parsed) => {  
  let entries = parsed.feed.entries.splice(0, 3)

  for (entry of entries) {
    await Post.findOrCreate({
      where: { id: entry.id }
    }).spread((_, created) => {
      if (created) {
        // if a new entry had to be created, send an email
        sendEmail(formatEntry(entry))
      }
    })
  }
})

Note my use of async and await here. This is for performance reasons, since it’s better for sqlite to run synchronous create operations rather than async ones, it often breaks on async operations. awaiting the findOrCreate promise makes the loop run synchronously, which is exactly what we want.

4. Run it every minute

I use cron to run the node script every minute to check for updates. Check your node install location by running which node (mine is /usr/local/bin/node) and run crontab -e to open the crontab editor.

Add the line * * * * * /usr/local/bin/node /path/to/your/script/index.js to check and email updates every minute. And you’re done!

Wrapping up

A quick, small project highlighted the importance of using various tools in modular ways to come up with something great. sqlite is perfect for such applications, and ‘offloading’ the actual checks to cron is much better and optimized than running a node script via forever/pm2 etc. Get the final version of Sangh at Github.