Configuration¶

The component configuration of asphalt-feedreader lets you configure a number of syndication feeds and a number of state stores for them (see below).

A basic configuration that creates a single feed pointing to CNN’s top stories might look like this:

components:
  feedreader:
    url: http://rss.cnn.com/rss/edition.rss

Once the component has started, the feed will be available as a resource of type FeedReader named default and accessible as ctx.feed.

Notice that the above configuration automatically detects the feed reader class. To avoid the overhead of the initial autodetection, we can tell the component directly what feed reader class to use. Since we know this particular feed is an RSS feed, we can specify the reader option accordingly:

components:
  feedreader:
    url: http://rss.cnn.com/rss/edition.rss
    reader: rss

For reference on what kinds of values are acceptable for the reader option, see the documentation of create_feed().

Setting up state stores¶

State stores are repositories where a feed can save its persistent state, including its current metadata and the entry IDs it has already seen. You can use feeds without state stores but if you restart the application, they may then report previously seen entries again.

The following state stores are provided out of the box:

asphalt.feedreader.stores.sqlalchemy
asphalt.feedreader.stores.redis
asphalt.feedreader.stores.mongodb

Each of these stores requires some database client resource, and the easiest way to get it is to use the corresponding Asphalt component. For example, to configure a simple sqlite based SQLAlchemy store, you’d first install asphalt-sqlalchemy and write the following configuration (following up from the previous examples):

components:
  sqlalchemy:
    url: sqlite:///feeds.sqlite
  feedreader:
    feeds:
      cnn:
        url: http://rss.cnn.com/rss/edition.rss
        reader: rss
        store: default
    stores:
      default:
        type: sqlalchemy

Any options under each state store configuration besides type will be directly passed to the constructor of the store class.

It is also possible to use a custom serializer with the built-in state stores, but that is usually unnecessary.