rssdThe filesystem is the API

A daemon that turns RSS and Atom feeds into a directory tree. No database, no socket, no client library — if it can read a folder, it's a client.

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How it works

GitHub

Reads are sacred

Every file is written to a temp name, fsynced, then renamed into place. A reader sees the old file or the new one — never a mix, never a half-written one. Every document is re-parsed with a strict XML parser before the rename, so malformed output can't reach the tree.

Nothing is ever overwritten

When a publisher edits a post, the new version lands beside the old one as .r2.xml and a stable symlink is repointed. Follow the symlink for current, or list .rN for the whole history.

One vocabulary, every feed

Publisher HTML is mapped onto a small fixed set of semantic tags. Wrapper divs, class attributes and tracking junk are gone; relative URLs are resolved. Every entry has the same shape no matter who wrote it.

The tree is the truth

Each entry embeds its own ID and content hash, so rm -rf var/ is fully recoverable. The daemon rebuilds what it knows by scanning the tree — and writes nothing.

Events you can tail

Every action appends one JSON object to var/events.jsonl, with a sequence number monotonic across restarts. If you see entry.new, the file already exists and is complete.

A reader that writes nothing

rss is a separate binary from rssd. It opens no file for writing, anywhere — which is the proof that the output tree really is a sufficient API for someone else's program.

Thirty seconds

bash

uv run rssd init demo/
uv run rssd daemon --root demo --poll-now

demo/store/rust-blog/
├── feed.xml
├── status.xml
└── entries/
    ├── 20260907T000000Z-9f2c1a3b-crates-io-update.xml     → newest
    ├── 20260907T000000Z-9f2c1a3b-crates-io-update.r1.xml
    └── 20260907T000000Z-9f2c1a3b-crates-io-update.r2.xml

Filenames sort chronologically under a plain ls. The id8 segment maps a file to an entry ID without opening it. Then read it however you like:

bash

rss ls rust-blog
rss show 9f2c1a3b
rss link 9f2c1a3b | xargs xdg-open
grep -rl "async" demo/store/*/entries/

Or open the vim-flavoured TUI:

bash

rss tui --root demo

rssdThe filesystem is the API

Reads are sacred

Nothing is ever overwritten

One vocabulary, every feed

The tree is the truth

Events you can tail

A reader that writes nothing

Thirty seconds ​

Thirty seconds