Planet Mercury

Mercury is intended a replacement for Sam Ruby's Planet Venus.

A planet is a kind of feed aggregator. It takes a list of newsfeeds (Atom, RSS, &c.), splices them together, and spits a set of HTML pages and/or a feed.

Quickstart

If you have the Go toolchain already configured, you can go install the binary:

go install github.com/kgaughan/mercury/cmd/@latest

By default, mercury will look for look for a file called mercury.toml in the current directory. This feed is in TOML format, but the key thing you need to know is that keys and values are separated with an =, string values must be quoted, and [[feed]] introduces new feed configuration.

If you want to use an explicitly named configuration file, you can pass this with the --config flag.

Here is an example file:

mercury.toml

name = "My Planet!"
url = "https://example.com/"
owner = "Jane Doe"
email = "jane.doe@example.com"
cache = "./cache"
timeout = "20s"
theme = "./theme"
output = "./output"
items = 10
max_pages = 2

[[feed]]
name = "Keith Gaughan"
feed = "https://keith.gaughan.ie/feeds/all.xml"

[[feed]]
name = "Inklings"
feed = "https://talideon.com/inklings/feed"

See the configuration details for more details on the meaning of each field.

Then run:

mercury

This will fetch all the feeds to the cache directory and write the site to the output directory.

Command line

The --help flag will show you the help information:

$ ./mercury --help
mercury - Generates an aggregated site from a set of feeds.

Flags:
  -C, --clean-cache     clean any obsolete entries from the cache
  -c, --config string   path to configuration (default "./mercury.toml")
  -h, --help            show help
  -B, --no-build        don't build anything
  -F, --no-fetch        don't fetch, just use what's in the cache
  -V, --version         print version and exit

Usually, the default behaviour is what you want: mercury will try to intelligently fetch any feeds and regenerate the site. Use --no-build if you just want to prime the cache but don't want to generate the site. Use --no-fetch if you want to regenerate the site without fetching any feeds. This can be useful if you're testing out a new theme.

If you want to free up some disc space, supply --clean-cache, which will remove any cached feeds that no longer appear in the configuration. If you want to do this without also updating any feeds or rebuilding the site, you should supply the --no-fetch and --no-build flags at the same time.