Lev Lazinskiy

Miniflux Dagger Module

I wrote a new Dagger module over the weekend that implements the miniflux python sdk and allows you to interact with a miniflux rss server as a part of your Dagger pipeline.

My immediate use case is to help generate the inputs for my openring module that I use to insert snippets into my blog from my blogroll (scroll down to see an example). Previously I maintained a text file by hand that included the links to all the rss feeds that I wanted to use for openring. Separately, I have a blogroll on my site that was redundant with this list. Further, I had a different yaml file that I was using to configure nom, the tui client for reading rss feeds. This means I had three different files that represented the same thing.

I’ve been running my own instance of miniflux for a few years now. It’s great! But I have not been using it lately since I moved to nom. I realized that nom has full support for miniflux so I was excited to create this module and eliminate the need to have all of these redundant files. The only thing worse than redundant files is redundant files in three different formats.

With this module I now have nom getting updates directly from miniflux, openring getting input directly from miniflux, and the blogroll on my links page can also be generated automatically from miniflux.

I have been enjoying building these types of modules lately that implement various SDKs because they can serve as a nice reference implementation for the library. Also, getting a CLI for free is an added bonus because I can interact with these services without needing to install any local dependencies.

This one is also special because it provides a good example of Daggers CurrentModule API that allows you to interact with files and directories of the current function. For example, the generate_sources function that I wrote grabs a list of feeds from miniflux and creates a text file inside the runtime container. All of this is happening in pure python without any Dagger-specific code, using the current_module function I can interact with any artifacts that my python code creates and turn them into first-class Dagger primitives such as File, Directory, or Container.

This module is helping me on my quest to build a fully Daggerized blog publishing pipeline. I am probably 80% there already, but there are many hacks in my existing workflow, and syndication is currently manual. This module gets me one step closer to the dream. If you use miniflux and/or openring and are manually maintaining files, I hope you give this a try and let me know what you think.