intake

intake is an arbitrary feed aggregator.

Feed source interface

The base intake directory is $XDG_DATA_HOME/intake. Each feed source's data is contained within a subdirectory of the base directory. The name of the feed source is the name of the subdirectory.

Feed source directories have the following structure:

intake
 |- <source name>
 |   |- intake.json
 |   |- state
 |   |- <item id>.item
 |   |- <item id>.item
 |   |- ...
 |- <source name>
 |   |  ...
 | ...

intake.json must be present; the other files are optional. Each .item file contains the data for one feed item. state provides a file for the feed source to write arbitrary data, e.g. JSON or binary data.

intake.json has the following structure:

{
  "action": {
    "fetch": {
      "exe": "<absolute path to program or name on intake's PATH>",
      "args": ["list", "of", "program", "arguments"]
    },
    "<action name>": {
      "exe": "...",
      "args": "..."
    }
  },
  "env": { ... }
}

Each key under action defines an action that can be taken for the source. The fetch action is required. env is optional. Each key under env will be set as an environment variable when executing actions.

When an action is executed, intake executes the exe program for the action with the corresponding args as arguments. The process's environment is as follows:

• intake's environment is inherited.
• STATE_PATH is set to the absolute path of state.
• Each key in env in config.json is passed with its value.

Anything written to stderr by the process will be logged by intake.

The fetch action is used to fetch the current state of the feed source. It receives no input and should write feed items to stdout as JSON objects, each on one line. All other actions are taken in the context of a single item. These actions receive the item as a JSON object on the first line of stdin. The process should write the item back to stdout with any changes as a result of the action.

An item must have a key under action with that action's name to support executing that action for that item. The value under that key may be any JSON structure used to manage the item-specific state.

All encoding is done with UTF-8. If an item cannot be parsed or the exit code of the process is nonzero, intake will consider the action to be a failure. No items or other feed changes will happen as a result of a failed action, except for changes to state done by the action process.

Item fields

An item has the following top-level fields:

• id: Required. A unique identifier within the scope of the feed source.
• created: Automatic. The Unix timestamp at which the item was generated. This attribute is automatically populated.
• active: Automatic. Whether the item is active. Inactive items are not displayed in channels.
• title: The title of the item. If an item has no title, is is used as a fallback title.
• author: An author name associated with the item.
• body: Body text of the item as raw HTML. This will be displayed in the item without further processing.
• link: A hyperlink associated with the item.
• time: A time associated with the item, not necessarily when the item was created. Feeds sort by time when it is defined and fall back to created.
• tags: A list of tags that describe the item. Tags help filter feeds that contain different kinds of content.
• tts: The time-to-show of the item. An item with tts defined is hidden from channel feeds until the current time is past created + tts.
• ttl: The time-to-live of the item. An item with ttl defined is not deleted by feed updates even if it is inactive if created + ttl is in the future.
• ttd: The time-to-die of the item. An item with ttd defined is deleted by feed updates even if it is active if created + ttd is in the past.
• action: An object with keys for all supported actions.