cli.rst

Command-line interface

reader comes with a command-line interface that exposes basic management functionality.

Warning

The CLI is is not fully stable, see the :ref:`roadmap <cli roadmap>` for details.

Note

The command-line interface is optional, use the cli extra to install its :ref:`dependencies <Optional dependencies>`.

Most commands need a database to work. The following are equivalent:

python -m reader --db /path/to/db some-command
READER_DB=/path/to/db python -m reader some-command

If no database path is given, ~/.config/reader/db.sqlite is used (at least on Linux).

Add a feed:

python -m reader add http://www.example.com/atom.xml

Update all feeds:

python -m reader update

Serve the web application locally (at http://localhost:8080/):

python -m reader serve

Updating feeds

For reader to actually be useful as a feed reader, feeds need to get updated and, if full-text search is enabled, the search index needs to be updated.

You can run the update command regularly to update feeds (e.g. every hour). Note that reader uses the ETag and Last-Modified headers, so, if supported by the the server, feeds will only be downloaded if they changed.

To avoid waiting too much for a new feed to be updated, you can run update --new-only more often (e.g. every minute); this will update only newly-added feeds. This is also a good time to update the search index.

You can achieve this using cron:

42 * * * *  reader update -v 2>&1 >>"/tmp/$LOGNAME.reader.update.hourly.log"
* * * * *   reader update -v --new-only 2>&1 >>"/tmp/$LOGNAME.reader.update.new.log"; reader search update 2>&1 >>"/tmp/$LOGNAME.reader.search.update.log"

If you are running reader on a personal computer, it might also be convenient to run update once immediately after boot:

@reboot     sleep 60; reader update -v 2>&1 >>"/tmp/$LOGNAME.reader.update.boot.log"

Reference

.. click:: reader._cli:cli
    :prog: reader
    :show-nested: