Tunneling TinyTinyRSS traffic through a Proxy

TinyTinyRSS (TT-RSS) is something that the Google reader always wanted and Feedly still wants to be. Just better! :)

TT-RSS is a free and open source feed aggregator, which can be deployed to your own machine. For example, my instance is running on a cubieboard in my living room. Thus, I’m independent of any company and their plans with my data :)

However, I don’t want to advertise TT-RSS too much, but I want to tell you how to fetch your feeds through a proxy, such as polipo or squid.

Configuring TT-RSS to use a Proxy

It’s apparently undocumented, but looking into the code it turns out that feeds are fetched using cURL:

$ grep -rn PROXY *
include/functions2.php:2257:            if (defined('_CURL_HTTP_PROXY')) {
include/functions2.php:2258:                    curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_PROXY, _CURL_HTTP_PROXY);
include/functions.php:389:                      if (defined('_CURL_HTTP_PROXY')) {
include/functions.php:390:                              curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_PROXY, _CURL_HTTP_PROXY);
plugins/af_unburn/init.php:41:                          if (defined('_CURL_HTTP_PROXY')) {
plugins/af_unburn/init.php:42:                                  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_PROXY, _CURL_HTTP_PROXY);

And as you can see, the code already supports the usage of a proxy: if (defined('_CURL_HTTP_PROXY')).

I think that might be very interesting to many of you guys and I’ve no idea why it is not documented. However, you can simply define the variable _CURL_HTTP_PROXY in your config.php file. For example, to use a proxy at host 127.0.0.1 listening at port 8123 add the following:

define ('_CURL_HTTP_PROXY', '127.0.0.1:8123');

Now, the TT-RSS traffic will go through the proxy at :8123, which might tunnel everything through, e.g., TOR. Thus, the location of your living room will not be disclosed :)

BONUS: Cache all the Images in Feeds

By default, TT-RSS will not cache the images in feeds. That means, if there is an image in an article, you will be redirected to load the image from a foreign server. That’s obviously something I’d like to avoid, especially because there are plenty of ads or tracking pixels which shouldn’t know about my habits and surf times. But there is an alternative: TT-RSS is able to cache images. It will download the images to your server and deliver the cached versions instead of forwarding you to somewhere else.

Unfortunately, that is not the default. If you want that functionality you need to configure every single feed (Edit Feed → Options → Cache images locally). And you must not forget to repeat that procedure for every new feed that will be added in 15+ months…

To avoid that you can simply open the database that TT-RSS uses (e.g. using phpMyAdmin), go to the table ttrss_feeds and modify the default value of the column cache_images from 0 to 1. If that is done, the images of every newly added feed will be cached by default.

If you’re too lazy to manually update the feeds that are already there you can simply run the following SQL query:

UPDATE `ttrss_feeds` SET `cache_images`=1 WHERE 1