Episode: 2931
Title: HPR2931: Wallabag for on premises article aggregation
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2931/hpr2931.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 13:29:00

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It's the 28th of October 2019 and this is HPR episode 2931 entitled Wallabag for on-premises article aggregation.
It's hosted by Be Easy and it's about 12 minutes long and carries a clean flag.
The summary is, in this episode I describe my trials and eventual triumph in installing Wallabag.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by archive.org.
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Hello Hacker public radio fans, this is Be Easy once again with another episode.
This one's going to be a short one just to briefly discuss a service that I just figured out really cool application called Wallabag.
And I've had some struggles getting installed but I want to talk about how I finally did get it to work and what it is.
So what is Wallabag? It is a replacement for things like paper or pocket.
A read it later server. So if you find something cool and you want to save for later, instead of just saving it as a bookmark, you can actually save it with the content and maybe a stripped down version of the website without all the ads and some of the comments section and all that stuff.
And you can go back to it later date. Now with pocket, the free version, it goes to whatever the current version of the website is.
But with the paid version, if that website ever goes down, you can it'll keep HTML version saved on your instance.
Now, something I've been wanting to do not for mostly just for because I'm interested in learning things is I like to move a lot of services that you can find outside on premises using opens or software.
And some of it is for privacy concerns. Some of it is just because like I said, I'm just interested in it.
So this was one of the ones I think I said to myself, you know what, once I found Wallabag, this is a perfect opportunity to finally replace a pocket.
It has a nice Android app that's available for that's on the froid and also in the Google Play Store.
And so I'm like, well, and it also has extensions that you can install for Firefox and Chrome.
So in terms of my use case, you know, that's those are all the use cases ahead for pocket and in all the different ways I access it the same ways pocket.
So I'm like, great, this will work.
So I took one of my Raspberry Pi's like I've said in other shoes, I have a set of four that are always on there and like a little array together.
And one of them is a pie hole right now. And for another one is a reddit server because I play around with reddit sometimes.
And then usually I also have another one that is a postgres server than one is a web application server.
And the web application server wasn't doing anything right now.
So I was like, well, let's do that.
And I'll, because one thing you can do is that you can sync, you can copy over all of your pocket links over to wallabag with an import function that you can do in the background.
If you use either rabbit MQ or reddit.
And I was like, well, I have a reddit server with this. So this is all looking really nice.
It looks like it was Providence that this is going to work out for me.
And then I go to the website and I follow the instructions and get everything installed on the Raspberry Pi.
And I get to the login page login, change my password. So everything's working. It's hitting the database, working everything's fine.
Then I go to my first site, which is my own website, my own company website.
And just try to save the homepage.
And it works. I'm like, great. This is working.
Then I go to another one of the sites I just had. I think it was a cybercity.biz site.
And I go to it and it crashes. I got a 500 error message.
And then I say, well, that's no good. Maybe it's just that link.
Let me go back and try a different page from my website.
And I go to like my about page crash.
So I'm like, why is it crashing? Then I start going through all these different sites in 95, 98% of the time it will crash.
And then I start reading online about what this error means.
And I was like, well, maybe it's running out of FPM memory because it's a PHP app.
And so I figure out how to increase the maximum amount of memory.
And it's still failing. I'm like, what's going on here?
And I probably could have played around with it more with the PHP settings, but I'm not a PHP person.
So I'm like, I wish this would just work. But it's not.
And so I leave it alone for a while. I'm like, okay, maybe this thing is not going to work for me.
I go back every once in a while and try to get something, get it to work a little bit more on the Raspberry Pi.
Get it hooked up to my Amazon fire tablet through after I'm like, okay, so the cup like the five or six sites that are on there, they do sync up.
So if I ever do get the work, the Android app works a great, but I can't get it to work.
And then one of the times I was on the site, instead of looking at the regular part of the documentation that saw this is in install instructions.
There's also a Docker container. So I'm like, okay, well, let me try one more time because I have another server on my network.
It's actually a gigabyte bricks, like an older one of those little mini computers, kind of like a Intel NUC.
It's like a i3 with four gigs of RAM on like 60 gig hard drive.
But it's running for the door 30 and it has cockpit installed, I'll put a link with the cockpit.
So it's a gooey that you can use to manage a bunch like that server and other servers as well.
If you just install cockpit on them too, you can reach them all from like single admin page.
And so I do that because I'm already running a couple of other apps, a couple that I made myself.
And then like a tiny tiny RSS reader and some other things on there and in a Docker.
And so I'm like, well, let me try this. So I try to do my same setup.
I try to mimic this setup that I have on Raspberry Pi's on there.
And I make a nice little Docker compose file that looks like it's going to work.
And I get everything set up, I get to this, I try to get everything installed.
And it keeps on feeling like it says it can't find the Postgres server for some reason.
So I'm like, okay, I could either go figure out, like go back to Docker Hub and try to figure out in the Docker file,
where the problem is and why it's not recognizing the network name.
And I'm still new at Docker. So I'm like, yeah, do I want to put all this time in for this? I got work to do.
So I'm like, well, if I start looking at all the different environment variables, you can set.
And it says, oh, yeah, if you just want to use SQLite, SQLite, then don't set the name of the database you're using.
Just leave it blank. And it'll, and then just create a volume where you want to store the like it inside of a photo called W.
The size of our size, W. W. So I swallow back size data. And that's where the SQLite deep dot DB file will live.
I'm like, okay, well, let me just do that. And so I ended up redoing the image, my image to make it so that uses SQLite.
And I'm like, well, you know what, I'm going to try to make it use right as I want to just see if I can just do it by itself.
And lo and behold, obviously can find the database because the database is inside the document.
It's just a little file. And this is not going to be a problem for me because it's going to be a single use system.
And there's only like a thousand entries in my pocket service. So I'm like, this is going to work just fine.
I get it all set up. I'm like, okay, it worked. I start to download everything's working there. I don't mind getting those.
I wasn't getting those FPM errors or anything.
And then I say, okay, well, let me try to sync everything without them. They would do try to use the sync service.
Maybe a thousand. It can do a thousand in the amount of time that it takes to do one HTTP request.
And I try and it doesn't know. It gets to like 300.
So I'm like, okay, great. Maybe I am going to set up Redis.
But I'm like, well, let me first see if I can set up my Fedora server, just let traffic coming through from that Redis server or my Raspberry Pi just come through.
And I just set the environment variable to say the Redis server that you're looking for is over there.
And lo and behold, it worked. And so I was able to finally get all my pocket entries migrated over.
To Wallabag. It's in use right now. I just read some articles this morning and archive them.
And so, you know, one of the things some of the things you can do, it's a really good clone.
Actually, it has the ability to add tags so you can, they can sort by your tags.
So I have like tags for, you know, learning about Linux, things about home improvement.
You know, any of the types of articles you want you just tag it, you can add multiple tags to it to a single article.
And so it's all working. I'm going to include information to on how to set it up using Docker.
It was a great experience to get me a little bit more acclimated with things in PHP because I'm not a PHP developer at all.
And every time I look at it, it makes my eyes bleed a little bit.
But it was good to learn that there was another environment variable.
So I did get a similar error actually when I would do the, do the, the sink.
Because as it starts to do more and more, it starts to really build up in memory.
So I had to increase the, the FPM memory, even in the Docker image, but the good thing is that instead of a Raspberry Pi,
where there's only what either half a gig or a gig of RAM, this is a bigger computer with four gigs of RAM available.
So balloon is big as it wanted to and actually finished the entire sink, which was great.
So like I said, I want to keep put a link in the show notes for Wallabag and also for cockpit.
So because if you use either sent us or for door, but actually even even open to on the server, and you like to have a web, a web facing admin page where you can do things in UI.
I don't do everything there like actually create all the doctor images using Docker compose behind the scenes, but managing them and then actually connecting so I can actually look at the status of all my Raspberry Pi and everything from the same console.
I like to do that from this console because all you have to do is install cockpit on those other devices and they will appear, you can make them appear in your dashboard.
So I'll put a link to that as well.
And so just that's it for this episode. I just want to share with everyone my experiences and and also share you with you this great application.
So that's it for this episode and like I always say, keep packing.
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