Simple newspaper

Terminal utility that generates EPUB documents from RSS feeds and URLs.

Dependencies

• Calibre e-book management application.
• Python modules; run pip install -r requirements.txt to install them

Configure

RSS

RSS feeds should be added to Calibre recipes. Calibre recipes' configuration files can be found at ~/.config/calibre/custom_recipes or, if Calibre has been installed as flatpak, ~/.var/app/com.calibre_ebook.calibre/config/calibre/custom_recipes.

URLs

The links that should be converted to EPUB documents should be added to a plain text file, e.g. ~/Documents/read-it-later.txt, like this:

www.example.com/my_article.html
Another article www.example.com/another_article
Yet another [article](www.example.com/yet_another.html)

Execute

The simple-newspaper utility saves the EPUB documents either into an external, not mounted storage device or into a normal directory in your file system.

External storage device

For the EPUB documents to be saved into a not mounted device, the following are needed:

• the path to the external device, e.g. /dev/disk/by-uuid/7afb-3231
• the directory that the device should be mounted to, e.g. /mnt/jane/sd
• the directory to save the EPUB files into. It should be a relative path on the target device, e.g. newspaper/news

Run:

python ebook_newspaper.py --recipes_dir ~/.config/calibre/custom_recipes --target_device /dev/disk/by-uuid/7afb-3231 --target_mount_point /mnt/jane/sd --target_dir newspaper/news --read_it_later_urls ~/Documents/read-it-later.txt

The utility will ask for the sudo password for the external storage to be mounted.

File system directory

For the EPUB documents to be saved into a directory in your $HOME, e.g. ~/Documents/newspaper, execute:

python ebook_newspaper.py --recipes_dir ~/.config/calibre/custom_recipes --home_target_dir ~/Documents/newspaper --read_it_later_urls ~/Documents/read-it-later.txt

More options

You can archive the old articles by setting the --archive option. If Calibre has been installed as flatpak, add the --flatpak option. E.g.,

python ebook_newspaper.py --recipes_dir ~/.var/app/com.calibre_ebook.calibre/config/calibre/custom_recipes --target_device /dev/disk/by-uuid/7afb-3231 --target_mount_point /mnt/jane/sd --target_dir newspaper/news --read_it_later_urls ~/Documents/read-it-later.txt --archive --flatpak