1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:17,840 Hello, and welcome to the Linux Lemming. 2 00:00:17,840 --> 00:00:23,240 I'm your host, Rasta Calavera, and here we are now at Episode 5. 3 00:00:23,240 --> 00:00:27,560 I know it's been a while since a release has come out, so we're going to start today 4 00:00:27,560 --> 00:00:31,120 by talking about where are my episodes. 5 00:00:31,120 --> 00:00:35,800 So my release schedule was recently disrupted due to illness. 6 00:00:35,800 --> 00:00:40,720 Luckily, I've been healthy, but members of my family and the academic institutions that 7 00:00:40,720 --> 00:00:45,760 they attend were impacted by the COVID pandemic. 8 00:00:45,760 --> 00:00:52,600 Thankfully, nobody in my family contracted COVID, but we had to practice quarantine procedure 9 00:00:52,600 --> 00:00:55,800 to keep ourselves and our communities safe. 10 00:00:55,800 --> 00:01:00,680 So this took time away from the project, and something like this may occur again in the 11 00:01:00,680 --> 00:01:01,680 future. 12 00:01:01,680 --> 00:01:07,680 So it's nice that I don't have a committed release schedule, but again, as time allows, 13 00:01:07,680 --> 00:01:10,440 these episodes will continue. 14 00:01:10,440 --> 00:01:16,200 So moving on to our next topic, what is the status with documentation? 15 00:01:16,200 --> 00:01:22,760 So very recently, I have been banging my head against the wall, trying to get Wallabag 16 00:01:22,760 --> 00:01:25,640 to run on a Raspberry Pi 4. 17 00:01:25,640 --> 00:01:34,480 If you're not familiar with the Wallabag project, it is an internet archiving bookmarking type 18 00:01:34,480 --> 00:01:43,560 piece of software, similar to other read-it-later softwares like Pocket or Instapaper, Feedly 19 00:01:43,560 --> 00:01:50,440 to some extent, very similar to those types of softwares. 20 00:01:50,440 --> 00:01:59,840 Some of the people in the Wallabag community are very nurturing, and I'm very thankful 21 00:01:59,840 --> 00:02:01,640 to have them around. 22 00:02:01,640 --> 00:02:11,200 One big issue that I came up with was that there is no ARM image for the Wallabag project. 23 00:02:11,200 --> 00:02:15,360 They don't offer anything for the ARM platform by default. 24 00:02:15,360 --> 00:02:24,480 So you have to look for community Docker images or even building your own Docker image. 25 00:02:24,480 --> 00:02:32,920 I went down the route of trying to find something on Docker Hub, and I found a workable image. 26 00:02:32,920 --> 00:02:40,120 One key thing to note is that the latest tag in Docker Hub is not actually the latest version 27 00:02:40,120 --> 00:02:41,840 of the project. 28 00:02:41,840 --> 00:02:45,640 So this, I've always heard about this being an issue in the past and how you should always 29 00:02:45,640 --> 00:02:52,560 use the version tag that you want to run, but I've never had a problem using the latest, 30 00:02:52,560 --> 00:02:58,880 and I think that is mainly because I stick to Linux server images whenever possible. 31 00:02:58,880 --> 00:03:06,240 But in this image, I had to use a 2.4.2 tag if I wanted the latest and greatest version 32 00:03:06,240 --> 00:03:12,680 of Wallabag, which I certainly did, because once I did get the project up and running, 33 00:03:12,680 --> 00:03:19,920 there was a feature that I desperately wanted where when I imported an OPML file, which 34 00:03:19,920 --> 00:03:28,360 is like all of my RSS feeds, they all came in as unread, and I have read those and want 35 00:03:28,360 --> 00:03:37,520 to keep those, and there was no mass select option in the older version of Wallabag. 36 00:03:37,520 --> 00:03:43,600 Actually that experimental feature just came out about a month ago or so. 37 00:03:43,600 --> 00:03:48,360 So I desperately wanted that new image. 38 00:03:48,360 --> 00:03:53,280 When I went out into the community, when I was having problems getting it up and running, 39 00:03:53,280 --> 00:04:00,160 my biggest frustration is documented on Reddit in the self-hosted subreddit. 40 00:04:00,160 --> 00:04:07,840 If anybody out there wants to see that whole crusade for aid, a user did provide me a working 41 00:04:07,840 --> 00:04:13,180 compose file, so I had submitted what I was currently using, and it had undergone some 42 00:04:13,180 --> 00:04:17,920 review and some tweaks, and that really helped me troubleshoot. 43 00:04:17,920 --> 00:04:22,360 And I'm just very appreciative, and it's always nice when someone takes that time and 44 00:04:22,360 --> 00:04:29,080 that extra care on an asynchronous platform like Reddit or in a forum, and it brings 45 00:04:29,080 --> 00:04:34,920 me to the reflection of really what I was doing wrong. 46 00:04:34,920 --> 00:04:43,320 So this is an instance where the problem existed between the keyboard and the chair. 47 00:04:43,320 --> 00:04:49,780 Part of it was my own ignorance in not reading very closely the documentation and having 48 00:04:49,780 --> 00:04:54,200 more confidence in my own abilities than I actually possessed. 49 00:04:54,200 --> 00:04:59,440 So that brings us to what were some of those problems. 50 00:04:59,440 --> 00:05:05,760 Wallabag does have documentation, but I didn't like the approach of having to clone their 51 00:05:05,760 --> 00:05:13,160 repo and use their own compose file, and since I was doing the LSIO swag reverse proxy, 52 00:05:13,160 --> 00:05:19,720 I like to follow their approach and stay as close to that project as I possibly can. 53 00:05:19,720 --> 00:05:27,400 LSIO does provide a proxy config for Wallabag, so that was a great place to start. 54 00:05:27,400 --> 00:05:34,600 One of my hangups is I don't like having the full name of the service in front of my domain. 55 00:05:34,600 --> 00:05:40,920 So for example, in the LSIO proxy config and in all of their configs, they always start 56 00:05:40,920 --> 00:05:44,440 the whole URL slug with the name of the service. 57 00:05:44,440 --> 00:05:50,920 So in this instance, they're saying you should have wallabag.mydomain.com. 58 00:05:50,920 --> 00:05:53,720 And I just, I think that complicates things a bit. 59 00:05:53,720 --> 00:06:01,200 I think it opens up visibility on the wider web, which I don't necessarily want. 60 00:06:01,200 --> 00:06:07,520 But once I got Wallabag working on the local host, I wanted to be able to access it using 61 00:06:07,520 --> 00:06:09,760 my domain. 62 00:06:09,760 --> 00:06:16,920 And there are a few things that are very picky about this process, both with the LSIO way 63 00:06:16,920 --> 00:06:22,280 of doing things and also with the Wallabag way of doing things. 64 00:06:22,280 --> 00:06:30,440 So for Wallabag, there is an environment variable that is the base URL or the domain. 65 00:06:30,440 --> 00:06:35,120 And that is extremely, extremely picky. 66 00:06:35,120 --> 00:06:41,400 One thing that I encountered that was difficult during the local host setup was you have to 67 00:06:41,400 --> 00:06:45,920 have the port number at the end of your URL. 68 00:06:45,920 --> 00:06:56,200 So if your IP scheme is something like 10.10.0.1 for your router, and your actual computer 69 00:06:56,200 --> 00:07:05,840 is 10.10.0.4, then you would have to use that IP plus the port of Wallabag, which is port 70 00:07:05,840 --> 00:07:09,640 80, to be able to reach that locally. 71 00:07:09,640 --> 00:07:17,280 You could not just put in 10.10.0.4 and reach your instance, it won't work. 72 00:07:17,280 --> 00:07:23,040 And then when you're running things in a container, you typically have the exposed port and the 73 00:07:23,040 --> 00:07:24,780 internal port. 74 00:07:24,780 --> 00:07:31,080 So in your compose file, in your port section, there are two numbers, one before the colon 75 00:07:31,080 --> 00:07:32,920 and one after the colon. 76 00:07:32,920 --> 00:07:38,560 So if you have nothing else running on port 80 externally, then your port scheme would 77 00:07:38,560 --> 00:07:40,560 be 8080. 78 00:07:40,560 --> 00:07:47,740 But for me, I have a lot of different services, a lot that use 80 and 443. 79 00:07:47,740 --> 00:07:54,160 So you have to be very conscious about how you set that up. 80 00:07:54,160 --> 00:07:59,840 So I spent a lot of time bringing containers up and down and just messing with that domain 81 00:07:59,840 --> 00:08:01,400 name parameter. 82 00:08:01,400 --> 00:08:06,920 I switched it to HTTPS, HTTP, my domain name. 83 00:08:06,920 --> 00:08:15,840 I tried my external Docker port of 80,000, and I would always hit a 502 error from my 84 00:08:15,840 --> 00:08:18,040 swag instance. 85 00:08:18,040 --> 00:08:30,440 So what I did was just waste hours searching online after messing with this domain thing. 86 00:08:30,440 --> 00:08:35,360 And then I figured, you know what, I'm just going to leave that alone with my working 87 00:08:35,360 --> 00:08:40,840 host, and I just need to switch gears and mess with the proxy config. 88 00:08:40,840 --> 00:08:43,040 And here's a really important thing. 89 00:08:43,040 --> 00:08:47,160 If you're messing with your proxy configs and your container names and everything else 90 00:08:47,160 --> 00:08:52,600 with the LSIO project, you need to understand the naming scheme. 91 00:08:52,600 --> 00:08:56,000 And I've skimmed over that in the past. 92 00:08:56,000 --> 00:08:59,320 And this is where it finally came to bite me. 93 00:08:59,320 --> 00:09:06,040 If I had been a really careful reader, it would have saved me lots of time. 94 00:09:06,040 --> 00:09:13,120 So if you look at the general template for the subdomain for a proxy config from LSIO, 95 00:09:13,120 --> 00:09:20,880 and I have that copied and pasted in the blog that accompanies this episode, they're very 96 00:09:20,880 --> 00:09:25,840 conscious about telling you how to set it up. 97 00:09:25,840 --> 00:09:32,760 And if you are not paying close attention like I did and figured you've done this enough 98 00:09:32,760 --> 00:09:40,520 times and it's not a big deal, really go back and read that closely because they're very 99 00:09:40,520 --> 00:09:45,560 conscious about the container names have to match. 100 00:09:45,560 --> 00:09:54,240 So in the actual template, they have that laid out very clearly where it says container 101 00:09:54,240 --> 00:09:58,320 name, container name, container name. 102 00:09:58,320 --> 00:10:05,800 And when I looked at my compose file, I had my service defined as Wallabag. 103 00:10:05,800 --> 00:10:08,720 I had the image and then I had the environment. 104 00:10:08,720 --> 00:10:14,200 I did not have a container name variable in there at all. 105 00:10:14,200 --> 00:10:20,040 So that was a huge punch in the gut like, oh my goodness, how did I screw that up? 106 00:10:20,040 --> 00:10:27,480 And if you look at another example compose file for any of the LSIO images, you'll see 107 00:10:27,480 --> 00:10:30,240 the service defined name. 108 00:10:30,240 --> 00:10:33,280 And in my blog, I use the example of audacity. 109 00:10:33,280 --> 00:10:39,320 So it'd be audacity, then the image and then directly below the image is the container 110 00:10:39,320 --> 00:10:43,780 name and they put in audacity. 111 00:10:43,780 --> 00:10:52,120 So if you are changing it to anything else, like say I wanted to call the Wallabag service 112 00:10:52,120 --> 00:11:01,360 keep, because I wanted to keep all of my articles, then the container name has to be keep. 113 00:11:01,360 --> 00:11:08,720 I can't stay as the default Wallabag and you have to make sure that those things match. 114 00:11:08,720 --> 00:11:15,560 So if I'm going to rename the service from Wallabag to keep, my new compose scheme is 115 00:11:15,560 --> 00:11:22,680 going to start with a service called keep, the image for Wallabag, and then a container 116 00:11:22,680 --> 00:11:25,320 name called keep. 117 00:11:25,320 --> 00:11:31,920 And all of that has to match the proxy config, which means that you need to save your config 118 00:11:31,920 --> 00:11:36,880 file as keep.subdomain.conf. 119 00:11:36,880 --> 00:11:40,400 All of those things have to be aligned with each other. 120 00:11:40,400 --> 00:11:47,240 And I'm sure experienced users are like, well, duh, of course that all makes sense. 121 00:11:47,240 --> 00:11:52,160 And it makes sense to me now, but I'm sure there are other people who will make the same 122 00:11:52,160 --> 00:12:00,360 mistake that I did as they try to customize things to meet their needs. 123 00:12:00,360 --> 00:12:07,600 So once you get all of that aligned, you have to go back to the Wallabag compose file. 124 00:12:07,600 --> 00:12:14,920 And in the symphony environment, you have to change that domain name to an HTTPS, because 125 00:12:14,920 --> 00:12:21,520 it's going to be used by the swag service, so it's going to be a secure connection. 126 00:12:21,520 --> 00:12:23,240 And you have to put in your whole thing. 127 00:12:23,240 --> 00:12:27,560 So for me, it'd be like keep.mydomain.com. 128 00:12:27,560 --> 00:12:34,800 And that was how I finally reached the level of success that I needed. 129 00:12:34,800 --> 00:12:42,520 So in terms of documentation, like I mentioned earlier, Wallabag does have documentation, 130 00:12:42,520 --> 00:12:50,920 but I think it could greatly be improved, but I don't think I'm the one to do so. 131 00:12:50,920 --> 00:13:00,120 I feel like my approach is still cobbled together, and especially because it's using a non-upstream 132 00:13:00,120 --> 00:13:02,160 image provided by the project. 133 00:13:02,160 --> 00:13:06,920 I don't feel like it would be appropriate for me to provide documentation using another 134 00:13:06,920 --> 00:13:08,480 community member's image. 135 00:13:08,480 --> 00:13:11,960 I don't feel like that's my place. 136 00:13:11,960 --> 00:13:21,400 And Wallabag change and provide their own multi-arch service getting into the ARM platform, 137 00:13:21,400 --> 00:13:27,720 then maybe I would consider providing documentation for how to get that up and running. 138 00:13:27,720 --> 00:13:32,640 But again, they kind of have their own way of even documenting how they recommend reverse 139 00:13:32,640 --> 00:13:37,600 proxies are used using IngenX and things like that. 140 00:13:37,600 --> 00:13:44,440 So because my use case is different using a different project's reverse proxy solution, 141 00:13:44,440 --> 00:13:49,800 again, I don't know that it would be my place to provide that. 142 00:13:49,800 --> 00:13:56,280 But who knows, things may change, and if they do, then I'll be there with some documentation 143 00:13:56,280 --> 00:13:59,160 ready and waiting. 144 00:13:59,160 --> 00:14:03,560 I do think, though, rather than contributing to the upstream project, it would be appropriate 145 00:14:03,560 --> 00:14:12,680 for me to provide this information on something like Reddit or something like Discourse, where 146 00:14:12,680 --> 00:14:18,200 it's all community-based, people all have their own use cases, and somebody may benefit 147 00:14:18,200 --> 00:14:20,840 from this struggle. 148 00:14:20,840 --> 00:14:29,480 So I will kind of push this out to those spaces rather than directly to the upstream project. 149 00:14:29,480 --> 00:14:38,000 So as a little bonus for this episode, I have been using Feedly as an RSS catcher for ten 150 00:14:38,000 --> 00:14:39,000 or more years. 151 00:14:39,000 --> 00:14:40,000 It's been forever. 152 00:14:40,000 --> 00:14:48,040 I started using it early in college and just never switched away to anything else. 153 00:14:48,040 --> 00:14:53,520 And they have this great feature called Boards, where you can save articles to a very specific 154 00:14:53,520 --> 00:14:54,520 board. 155 00:14:54,520 --> 00:14:58,200 It's essentially like tagging something, and then it's easy to find. 156 00:14:58,200 --> 00:14:59,400 You can read it later. 157 00:14:59,400 --> 00:15:01,440 It never goes away. 158 00:15:01,440 --> 00:15:09,560 But when you export your RSS feeds from Feedly, it doesn't keep any of the tags, and it doesn't 159 00:15:09,560 --> 00:15:16,200 keep them organized by board, which is a huge bummer. 160 00:15:16,200 --> 00:15:21,800 And Wallabag, well, they do have an import data section for a lot of different services. 161 00:15:21,800 --> 00:15:25,040 They don't have anything directly for Feedly. 162 00:15:25,040 --> 00:15:31,760 And I will say, Feedly does not make it easy to export your file. 163 00:15:31,760 --> 00:15:36,760 If you go and dig into the settings of Feedly, you would expect to find an export button 164 00:15:36,760 --> 00:15:39,200 front and center, and it's not there. 165 00:15:39,200 --> 00:15:44,680 It's kind of hidden off to the side above your feeds directly, and you have to like 166 00:15:44,680 --> 00:15:48,920 click this little, I don't remember if it's like an arrow or the three-button hamburger 167 00:15:48,920 --> 00:15:50,640 type thing. 168 00:15:50,640 --> 00:15:55,080 But it definitely could be easier to find. 169 00:15:55,080 --> 00:16:05,120 So once I got that out of Feedly, it didn't do what I wanted it to, because it just brought 170 00:16:05,120 --> 00:16:12,680 in all of my subscriptions, but none of my organization from the board. 171 00:16:12,680 --> 00:16:14,680 And that's really what I cared about. 172 00:16:14,680 --> 00:16:18,040 I can resubscribe to RSS feeds on my own. 173 00:16:18,040 --> 00:16:25,960 That's not a big deal, but I want my saved data that I have 10-plus years of time invested 174 00:16:25,960 --> 00:16:27,160 in. 175 00:16:27,160 --> 00:16:35,720 So I was really upset by this, and one thing that I noticed in Feedly is when you're looking 176 00:16:35,720 --> 00:16:40,800 at a board, all of your saved articles are there, and you can scroll down and scroll 177 00:16:40,800 --> 00:16:45,680 down and scroll down until your entire history is present on the webpage. 178 00:16:45,680 --> 00:16:52,000 And I was thinking, well, there's got to be a way to scrape this webpage and get things 179 00:16:52,000 --> 00:16:56,560 like the title of the article and the URL that's associated with it. 180 00:16:56,560 --> 00:16:58,680 There has to be a way to do that. 181 00:16:58,680 --> 00:17:06,160 So I did some digging online, and I found an article from a data science provider about 182 00:17:06,160 --> 00:17:12,280 this exact thing, how they scrape websites to grab the URLs and the titles of these things, 183 00:17:12,280 --> 00:17:17,160 and then they put them in a nice, neat table for you so you can easily copy and paste them 184 00:17:17,160 --> 00:17:19,200 into a spreadsheet. 185 00:17:19,200 --> 00:17:26,720 So now that I can put things in a spreadsheet, I can make a CSV file, which is pretty universal. 186 00:17:26,720 --> 00:17:34,200 And in this new RSS catcher and in Wallabag, I can put that in. 187 00:17:34,200 --> 00:17:41,320 Now Wallabag, the only CSV import that they support is through a service called Instapaper. 188 00:17:41,320 --> 00:17:50,800 So I had to create an Instapaper account and then export my empty data from Instapaper just 189 00:17:50,800 --> 00:17:54,280 so I could see how they format their CSV. 190 00:17:54,280 --> 00:18:00,040 And once I understood how they formatted it, I could use the code that I found to scrape 191 00:18:00,040 --> 00:18:06,240 my feedly history and then put all of that into an Instapaper format and then import 192 00:18:06,240 --> 00:18:08,480 it into Wallabag and boom. 193 00:18:08,480 --> 00:18:19,240 I had my 10 years of saved data now hosted on my own land, which thank goodness for that. 194 00:18:19,240 --> 00:18:23,160 I enjoy the graphical interface of feedly. 195 00:18:23,160 --> 00:18:25,720 I think they do a lot of good things. 196 00:18:25,720 --> 00:18:31,000 But in terms of owning your data, it's not really there. 197 00:18:31,000 --> 00:18:34,120 And that's kind of a big disappointment for me. 198 00:18:34,120 --> 00:18:42,280 So I think now is the time for me to remove myself from that ecosystem after all this 199 00:18:42,280 --> 00:18:47,760 time and really double down on owning my own data. 200 00:18:47,760 --> 00:18:53,360 And I do like Wallabag because not only can you tag the different articles, but you can 201 00:18:53,360 --> 00:19:00,160 put in annotations, you can export them in different formats like PDF or EPUB, a whole 202 00:19:00,160 --> 00:19:02,040 bunch of different things. 203 00:19:02,040 --> 00:19:07,200 So the flexibility offered by Wallabag is just phenomenal. 204 00:19:07,200 --> 00:19:11,360 And I will say that they do have a hosted option. 205 00:19:11,360 --> 00:19:17,400 So if you don't want to go through the struggle or the effort of hosting your own instance 206 00:19:17,400 --> 00:19:24,280 of Wallabag, they do have a paid option and it's pretty reasonable considering it's an 207 00:19:24,280 --> 00:19:29,400 open source project and everything that they offer. 208 00:19:29,400 --> 00:19:35,440 When you compare the price between Wallabag and feedly, feedly is kind of tiered and Wallabag 209 00:19:35,440 --> 00:19:37,800 is a fixed price. 210 00:19:37,800 --> 00:19:44,600 And you can certainly get feedly for cheaper, but you still don't have that ownership of 211 00:19:44,600 --> 00:19:48,040 your data even on the paid tier. 212 00:19:48,040 --> 00:19:55,840 So I think paying more to own your information is worth it in every respect. 213 00:19:55,840 --> 00:20:01,040 And I was getting very close to just saying forget it and paying for that instance of 214 00:20:01,040 --> 00:20:11,000 Wallabag, but my perseverance and stubbornness led me to finally getting my own self-hosted 215 00:20:11,000 --> 00:20:13,440 solution. 216 00:20:13,440 --> 00:20:26,240 So that brings us to the end of episode 5.