RSS-Bridge — Generate RSS Feeds for Any Website

Introduction

RSS-Bridge is a self-hosted web application that creates RSS and Atom feeds for websites that have removed or never offered them. It ships with hundreds of built-in "bridges" — scrapers that extract structured content from sites like YouTube, Twitter/X, Reddit, Instagram, and many others — and exposes the results as standard syndication feeds consumable by any feed reader.

What RSS-Bridge Does

• Generates RSS 2.0, Atom, JSON, and plain HTML feeds from websites without native feeds
• Ships with 300+ bridges covering social media, news sites, forums, and software trackers
• Supports custom bridge development for scraping any site with PHP
• Provides format conversion so you can consume feeds in your preferred reader format
• Caches responses to reduce load on upstream sites and improve response times

Self-Hosting & Configuration

• Deploy with Docker using the official image, or host on any PHP 8.1+ web server
• Configure allowed bridges in config.ini.php to limit which scrapers are active
• Set cache duration and backend (file, SQLite, Memcached) in the config file
• Place behind a reverse proxy with rate limiting to prevent abuse on public instances
• Optionally enable authentication to restrict access to your instance

Key Features

• Extensive bridge library covers social media, code forges, shopping sites, and government portals
• Feed output formats include RSS 2.0, Atom, JSON Feed, and plain text
• Built-in web UI lets you browse bridges, configure parameters, and preview feeds
• Lightweight PHP application runs on minimal hosting (shared hosting works)
• Active community contributes new bridges regularly

Comparison with Similar Tools

• FreshRSS — a feed reader that consumes RSS, whereas RSS-Bridge generates feeds for sites that lack them
• Miniflux — minimalist feed reader, complements RSS-Bridge as a consumer of generated feeds
• Huginn — general-purpose automation agent that can scrape sites, but heavier setup for simple feed generation
• Feed Creator — commercial service for creating feeds, RSS-Bridge is the self-hosted open source alternative

FAQ

Q: Is scraping websites with RSS-Bridge legal? A: RSS-Bridge performs the same requests a browser would. Legality depends on your jurisdiction and the target site's terms of service. Use responsibly and respect robots.txt.

Q: Can I add a bridge for a site that is not supported? A: Yes. Bridges are PHP classes that implement a simple interface. The documentation provides a guide for writing custom bridges.

Q: Does it handle JavaScript-rendered pages? A: No. RSS-Bridge uses server-side HTTP requests and HTML parsing. Sites that require JavaScript rendering need a headless browser approach, which is outside RSS-Bridge's scope.

Q: How do I use the generated feeds? A: Copy the feed URL from the RSS-Bridge web interface and paste it into any feed reader (FreshRSS, Miniflux, Feedly, NewsBlur, etc.).

Sources

• https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge
• https://rss-bridge.github.io/rss-bridge/