tt-rss and postgresql

sunday, 4 january 2015

when Google killed its Google Reader service, the hunt for an alternate aggregator service began. I and everyone else who were used to Google’s free service were now scrambling to other providers, many whose servers were not prepared for the influx of new users. Further service disruptions and performance constraints eventually led to the idea of hosting my own aggregator and be done with it.

Tiny Tiny RSS, or tt-rss, to the rescue. Relatively straight forward to install with several useful plugin extensions and skinning to boot. When I consider all the hours spent repeatedly customizing CSS templates for Google Reader to get the clean look and layout I prefer, every time Google altered their service, I wonder how it took me so long to find tt-rss which betters what I was trying to replace!

I use tt-rss with PostgreSQL. Version upgrades to PostgreSQL are to be expected on Debian Sid, requiring that the database be migrated, if you want to keep your Sid install current.

back up the database

Before updating the PostgreSQL packages..

su - postgres pg_dumpall > dump.sql exit # make a safe copy of the data cp ~postgres/dump.sql $HOME/

Exporting the tt-rss OPML data might not be a bad idea to do at this time as well.

update postgresql

sudo apt-get purge postgresql-<old.version> sudo apt-get install postgresql-<new.version> # backup client authentication file and change socket authentication method sudo cp /etc/postgresql/<new.version>/main/pg_hba.conf /etc/postgresql/<new.version>/main/pg_hba.conf.dist sudo sed -i 's/^\(local *all *all *\) peer/\1 md5/' /etc/postgresql/<new.version>/main/pg_hba.conf

Purging the old version of PostgreSQL will also remove the old database.

restore the database

su - postgres psql < dump.sql exit # remove copies of the data sudo rm ~postgres/dump.sql $HOME/dump.sql

gotchas

If a Debian distribution upgrade is made, upgrading PostgreSQL before the above steps are taken—it happens—a second PostgreSQL instance will be created utilizing a different port. kill the newer instance (as stopping the PostgreSQL service will terminate both server instances)..

ps -ef | grep postgresql sudo kill <newer.pid>

Backup the data and then purge the older PostgreSQL package (which will stop the remaining PostgreSQL instance and remove its associated database).

Restore the default PostgreSQL port configuration (which the existing tt-rss configuration references) and restart the upgraded PostgreSQL server..

sudo sed -i 's/port = 543./port = 5432/' /etc/postgresql/<new.version>/main/postgresql.conf sudo /etc/init.d/postgresql start

Restore the database and you are ready to go!

»»  colemak

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