This Python library is a parallel feed updater for the Nextcloud News app
Nextcloud does not require people to install threading or multiprocessing libraries. Because the feed update process is mainly limited by I/O, parallel fetching of RSS feed updates can speed up the updating process significantly.
In addition, Web Cron is not a supported cron setting since the update process may time out.
Therefore the News app provides an API that offers a more fine grained control over updating feeds. This Python project implements an update mechanism that is based on the updater REST API or (new in Nextcloud News 8.1.0) the console based update API.
- Python >=3.5
To run the updates via an external threaded script the cron updater has to be disabled. To do that go to the admin section an uncheck the Use Nextcloud cron checkbox or open nextcloud/data/news/config/config.ini and set:
useCronUpdates = true
to:
useCronUpdates = false
There are two different ways to install the updater:
- Installation using pip (recommended)
- Manual installation
- No installation
Since 8.2 the package is available on pypi for installation via pip (the Python library package manager).
To install pip on your distribution of choice, consolidate the pip documentation
Note: You need to install the Python 3 version of pip
After installing pip, run:
sudo pip3 install nextcloud_news_updater
To update the library, run:
sudo pip3 install --upgrade nextcloud_news_updater
To uninstall the library run:
sudo pip3 uninstall nextcloud_news_updater
If you don't want to install the updater via pip, you can install it manually. This requires setuptools to be installed. On Ubuntu this can be done by running:
sudo apt-get install python3-setuptools
Then install the package like this:
python3 setup.py install --install-scripts=/usr/bin
To uninstall the updater run:
python3 setup.py uninstall
If you do not want to install the script at all you can call it directly.
Simply run the updater using:
python3 -m nextcloud_news_updater /path/to/nextcloud
There are two ways to run the updater:
Using the console API (recommended):
nextcloud-news-updater /path/to/nextcloud
Using the REST API (when running the updater on a different machine than Nextcloud):
nextcloud-news-updater https://domain.com/path/to/nextcloud --user admin_user --password admin_password
Note: admin_user is a user id with admin rights, admin_password the user's password
You can view all options by running:
nextcloud-news-updater --help
usage: __main__.py [-h] [--threads THREADS] [--timeout TIMEOUT]
[--interval INTERVAL] [--apilevel {v1-2,v2,v15}]
[--loglevel {info,error}] [--config CONFIG]
[--phpini PHPINI] [--user USER] [--password PASSWORD]
[--version] [--mode {endless,singlerun}] [--php PHP]
[url]
positional arguments:
url The URL or absolute path to the directory where
Nextcloud is installed. Must be specified on the
command line or in the config file. If the URL starts
with http:// or https://, a user and password are
required. Otherwise the updater tries to use the
console based API which was added in 8.1.0
optional arguments:
-h, --help show this help message and exit
--threads THREADS, -t THREADS
How many feeds should be fetched in parallel, defaults
to 10
--timeout TIMEOUT, -s TIMEOUT
Maximum number of seconds for updating a feed,
defaults to 5 minutes
--interval INTERVAL, -i INTERVAL
Update interval between fetching the next round of
updates in seconds, defaults to 15 minutes. The update
timespan will be subtracted from the interval.
--apilevel {v1-2,v2,v15}, -a {v1-2,v2,v15}
API level. Use v15 for News 15 or later, or v1-2 for
releases prior to that
--loglevel {info,error}, -l {info,error}
Log granularity, info will log all urls and received
data, error will only log errors
--config CONFIG, -c CONFIG
Path to config file where all parameters except can be
defined as key values pair. See the README.rst for
more information
--phpini PHPINI, -P PHPINI
Custom absolute path to the php.ini file to use for
the command line updater. If omitted, the default one
will be used
--user USER, -u USER Admin username to log into Nextcloud. Must be
specified on the command line or in the config file if
the updater should update over HTTP
--password PASSWORD, -p PASSWORD
Admin password to log into Nextcloud if the updater
should update over HTTP
--version, -v Prints the updater's version
--mode {endless,singlerun}, -m {endless,singlerun}
Mode to run the updater in: endless runs the update
again after the specified interval, singlerun only
executes the update once
--php PHP Path to the PHP binary, e.g. /usr/bin/php7.0, defaults
to php
You can also put your settings in a config file, looking like this:
[updater]
threads = 10
interval = 900
loglevel = error
# or https://domain.com/nextcloud when using the REST API
url = /path/to/nextcloud
# or v2 which is currently a draft
apilevel = v15
mode = endless
# The following lines are only needed when using the REST API
user = admin
password = admin
# The following lines are only needed when using the console API
# path to php binary
php = /usr/bin/php7.0
phpini = /path/to/custom/php.iniWarning: If you use REST API with user and password assigned in the config file, you probably don't want anyone else but the file owner to see your user/password in the file. Secure it with:
chmod 600 /path/to/config
Note: You can omit options in the config file if you want to use the defaults, but you can not have more than the allowed parameters present, otherwise an exception will abort the updater.
Then run the updater with:
nextcloud-news-updater -c /path/to/config
Note: Command line parameters will always overwrite config parameters, so if you just want to change your loglevel to info for one run you can now do the following without globally changing the config file:
nextcloud-news-updater -c /path/to/config --mode singlerun --loglevel info
Almost always you want to run and stop the updater using your in init system. As for Systemd, you can create a simple text file at /etc/systemd/system/nextcloud-news-updater.service with the following contents:
[Unit]
After=default.target
[Service]
Type=simple
User=http
ExecStart=/usr/bin/nextcloud-news-updater -c /etc/nextcloud/news/updater.ini
[Install]
WantedBy=default.targetThen to enable and start it run:
sudo systemctl enable nextcloud-news-updater.service sudo systemctl start nextcloud-news-updater.service
Note: If you are using the cli based updater (as in set an absolute directory as url) you need to set the web-server user as user in the unit file. Otherwise the command will fail because Nextcloud checks for the owner of its files. This user varies from distribution to distribution, e.g in Debian and Ubuntu you would use the www-data user:
[Unit]
After=default.target
[Service]
Type=simple
User=www-data
ExecStart=/usr/bin/nextcloud-news-updater -c /etc/nextcloud/news/updater.ini
[Install]
WantedBy=default.targetIf you are using the REST API, most of the time you can get away by using nobody as user, but again, that might vary depending on your distribution.
On Alpine/postmarketOS/Gentoo/Artix or the other OpenRC based distros, you can create a simple text file at /etc/init.d/nextcloud-news-updater with the following contents:
#!/sbin/openrc-run
description="Nextcloud News Updater Daemon"
pidfile=${pidfile:-/run/nextcloud-news-updater.pid}
output_log="/var/log/nextcloud-news-updater/output.log"
error_log="/var/log/nextcloud-news-updater/error.log"
command=${command:-/usr/bin/nextcloud-news-updater}
command_user=${command_user:-www-data:www-data}
command_args="-c /etc/nextcloud/news/updater.ini"
command_background=trueThen to enable and start it run:
sudo -u www-data mkdir /var/log/nextcloud-news-updater
sudo -u www-data touch /var/log/nextcloud-news-updater/output.log \
/var/log/nextcloud-news-updater/error.log
sudo chmod 755 /etc/init.d/nextcloud-news-updater
sudo rc-update add nextcloud-news-updater
sudo rc-service nextcloud-news-updater start
If you are having trouble debugging updater errors, try running it again using the info loglevel:
nextcloud-news-updater --loglevel info -c /path/to/config.ini
If you are using self-signed certificates, don't. It's very easy to sign your cert for free from Lets Encrypt
If you still have to use a self-signed certificate no matter what, don't patch the code to turn off certificate verification but rather globally add your certificate to the trusted certificates. Read up on your distributions documentation to find out how.
Yes, you can by using the --mode singlerun parameter which will exit after one full update.
However it's your job to ensure, that the job will not be executed more than once at the same time. If update jobs overlap, they can take down your system and/or server since each new updater will slow down the previous ones causing more updaters to be spawned.
If you can not ensure that the updater is run only one at a time use the default mode (--mode endless). This mode runs the update in a loop. You can control the update frequency through the --interval parameter (or interval using a config file). The updater works in the following way: * If a full update takes longer than the passed interval, another update will be run immediately afterwards * If a full update took less than the passed interval, the updater will sleep for the remaining time and run an update afterwards
The updater uses the PHP executable to run the occ file inside your nextcloud directory. The general process boils down to the following:
# delete folders and feeds marked for deletion
php -f /home/bernhard/programming/core/occ news:updater:before-update
# get all feeds to udpate
php -f /home/bernhard/programming/core/occ news:updater:all-feeds
# run all feed updates
php -f /home/bernhard/programming/core/occ news:updater:update-feed FEED_ID USER_ID
# delete old articles
php -f /home/bernhard/programming/core/occ news:updater:after-updateMost of the time there are two possible points of failure that can be debugged by using the --logelevel info parameter:
Most distributions uses different php.ini files for your command line and web-server. This can manifest itself in weird errors like not being able to connect to the database. The solution is to either adjust php.ini used for the CLI PHP or to use a different php.ini altogether by specifying the --phpini parameter, e.g.:
nextcloud-news-updater -c /path/to/config --phpini /etc/php/nextcloud-news-updater.ini
The news:updater:all-feeds command returns invalid JSON. This can be due to due broken or missing php.ini settings or PHP warnings/errors produced by Nextcloud. The solution to this issue can range from adjusting your php.ini (see previous point) to manually patching Nextcloud to remove the warnings from the output.
Since Centos only provides Python 3.4, you can use SoftwareCollections to install a newer Python version.
For example Python 3.5: https://www.softwarecollections.org/en/scls/rhscl/rh-python35/
# 1. Install the Software Collection Repository
$ sudo yum install centos-release-scl
# 2. Install the collection:
$ sudo yum install rh-python35
# 3. Start using software collections:
$ scl enable rh-python35 bash
# 4. Install nextcloud-news.updater
$ sudo pip3 install nextcloud_news_updaterAfter the install you can run the updater as a service by extending the service file with the correct environment variable for your Python version. In this example we use Python 3.5:
[Unit]
After=default.target
[Service]
Type=simple
User=http
ExecStart=/usr/bin/nextcloud-news-updater -c /etc/nextcloud-news-updater.ini
Environment=LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/rh/rh-python35/root/usr/lib64
[Install]
WantedBy=default.target