Mastodon RSS Dotnet Bot

Setup your own fediverse bot from multiple RSS feeds

A very Simple Command-Line based Mastodon RSS Dotnet Bot

Sometimes the best things are just the simple things.

This repository contains a simple RSS bot for Mastodon, implemented in C# using .NET, works in linux/windows/macos. The bot is designed to fetch RSS feeds and post articles to a Mastodon instance.

All the interface is a very simple command-line, and the database is just a local sqlite file. This is the code behind of @msftdevblogs, and it is scheduled in a very small random linux box with a crontab.

Features

• Fetch and process RSS feeds from specified URLs.
• Post articles to a Mastodon instance.
• Configurable options for access token, Mastodon host, RSS URL, and limit on posts to publish.

Getting Started

Pre-compiled binaries

Download a precompiled binaries from the releases page, decompress it, and optionally add the pat to your system variables.

Build

Clone the repository to your local machine:

git clone https://github.com/mahomedalid/mastodon-rss-dotnet-bot.git

Navigate to the repository directory and build the project:

cd mastodon-rss-dotnet-bot
dotnet build

Docker

Pull the image

docker pull ghcr.io/mahomedalid/fediverse/mastodon-rss-bot:latest

Start the container specifiying the env variables for feeds (comma separated), instance of the bot and access token, ex.

docker run \
  -e "RSSBOT_FEEDS=https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCVvpATOqqanu2jD5-ttRYLQ;https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/category/csharp/feed/" \
  -e "RSSBOT_INSTANCEHOST=dotnet.social" \
  -e "RSSBOT_ACCESSTOKEN=<myaccesstoken>"
  -d rssbot

The default image is configured to do one post per hour, and two fetch posts daily. If you want to force the pull:

docker exec -it <containerid> bash
root@containerid:/opt/rssbot# ./fetch_env.sh

If you want to test the post:

docker exec -it <containerid> bash
root@containerid:/opt/rssbot# ./post.sh

Usage

Run the bot using the CLI interface. Here's an example command to fetch and process an RSS endpoint:

dotnet run fetch-rss --rssUrl <RSS_URL>

Replace <RSS_URL> with the URL of the RSS feed you want to fetch. I have added a util script to fetch from multiple sources in a simple txt file, see scripts/fetcher.sh.

To post articles to Mastodon, use the following command:

dotnet run post --accessToken <ACCESS_TOKEN> --host <MASTODON_HOST> --top <NUMBER_OF_POSTS>

Replace <ACCESS_TOKEN> with your Mastodon access token, <MASTODON_HOST> with the Mastodon instance host, and <NUMBER_OF_POSTS> with the number of posts to publish.

ROADMAP

Bunch of TODOS to fix, look into the code, including templating, configurable hashtags, skip old posts, tag authors, etc.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! If you encounter any bugs or have suggestions for improvements, please feel free to open an issue or submit a pull request.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE file for details.