Miniflux

Miniflux is a minimalist, opinionated feed reader designed for developers who value speed, privacy, and extensibility. The application is a single static binary written in Go, making it trivial to deploy across Linux distributions, Docker containers, or even bare‑metal servers. Its architecture revolves around a thin API layer that exposes CRUD operations for feeds, articles, and user settings, while the heavy lifting—feed parsing, content extraction, and search indexing—is performed locally on a PostgreSQL backend. This design keeps network traffic to a minimum, allowing developers to host Miniflux behind reverse proxies or VPNs without compromising performance.

Technical Stack

• Language & Runtime: Go 1.21+, compiled to a statically linked binary; no runtime dependencies.
• Web Framework: Custom HTTP router with middleware for CORS, CSRF, and content‑security policies.
• Database: PostgreSQL (full‑text search via tsvector), with optional SQLite for lightweight deployments.
• Feed Parsing: Built‑in support for Atom, RSS, and JSON Feed; uses go-feedparser under the hood.
• Content Extraction: Local Readability parser written in Go; customizable CSS selectors for scraping.
• Search Engine: PostgreSQL full‑text search powered by pg_trgm for fuzzy matching and relevance scoring.
• Containerization: Official Docker image available; supports multi‑stage builds for minimal images.

Core Capabilities

• RESTful API: Exposes endpoints such as /api/v1/feeds, /api/v1/articles, and authentication via JWT or session cookies. Developers can build custom dashboards, mobile clients, or integrate with existing workflows.
• Webhooks & Extensions: Supports outbound webhooks on article events, enabling integration with task managers or notification services. The API also accepts custom headers for authentication and routing.
• Full‑text Search: Queryable via /api/v1/search?q=<term>; leverages PostgreSQL’s native full‑text search with stemming and stop words.
• Attachment Handling: Stores enclosures (podcasts, images) in a local filesystem or cloud storage; provides secure download URLs.
• Internationalization: 20 language packs are bundled as JSON files, easily extended with new translations.

Deployment & Infrastructure

Miniflux’s statically linked binary eliminates the need for package managers, making it ideal for immutable infrastructure. For production, a typical stack includes:

1. Reverse Proxy (Nginx/Traefik) – handles TLS termination, HTTP/2 disabling for privacy, and rate limiting.
2. PostgreSQL – either a managed cloud instance or a local container; the schema is lightweight (~5 MB).
3. Storage – local disk for enclosures; can be swapped with S3‑compatible object storage via environment variables.
4. Scaling – multiple instances behind a load balancer share the same PostgreSQL database; the API is stateless except for session cookies, enabling horizontal scaling.

Containerization is straightforward: the Docker image exposes port 8080, accepts environment variables for DB connection, and supports volume mounts for persistent storage.

Integration & Extensibility

• Custom Scrapers: Developers can define CSS selectors or regex rules in the admin UI to tailor content extraction for niche sites.
• Media Proxy: All media requests pass through an internal proxy, stripping tracking parameters and enforcing no-referrer policies.
• YouTube Privacy: Videos are embedded via youtube-nocookie.com, with optional fallback to Invidious. This is exposed as a configuration flag in the API.
• OpenAPI Spec: The REST API is documented with Swagger/OpenAPI, facilitating SDK generation in multiple languages.

Developer Experience

• Configuration: Environment‑driven (MINIFLUX_ prefixed variables) or a simple config.toml; no complex YAML or JSON required.
• Documentation: The README, API docs, and a dedicated docs/ folder provide thorough guidance. The codebase is well‑structured with clear package boundaries.
• Community & Support: Active GitHub discussions, a dedicated Discord channel, and frequent releases under Apache 2.0 license encourage contributions.
• Extensibility: The plugin system is minimal but sufficient; developers can fork the repo, add middleware, or expose new endpoints without altering core logic.

Use Cases

Advantages Over Alternatives

• Performance: Go’s concurrency model delivers sub‑200 ms API responses even with thousands of feeds.
• Privacy: Built‑in tracker removal, no telemetry, and media proxy set it apart from cloud‑hosted readers.
• Licensing: Apache 2.0 allows commercial use without copyleft obligations, unlike GPL‑licensed readers.
• Simplicity: A single binary and a PostgreSQL database reduce operational overhead compared to monolithic PHP or Node.js stacks.
• Extensibility: Custom scrapers and webhooks give developers control over