Debian/Ubuntu: Setup Planet Venus To Combine Two Or More RSS Feeds

Planet is a flexible feed aggregator. It downloads news feeds published by web sites and aggregates their content together into a single combined feed, latest news first. It uses Mark Pilgrim’s Universal Feed Parser to read from CDF, RDF, RSS and Atom feeds; Leonard Richardson’s Beautiful Soup to correct markup issues; and either Tomas Styblo’s templating engine or Daniel Viellard’s implementation of XSLT to output static files in any format you can dream up.

You can use this tool to combine two or more feeds easily i.e. this software act as a “Feed Aggregator”.

Debian/Ubuntu: Setup Planet Venus as feed aggregator

The following instructions were tested on:

1. Ubuntu Linux 12.04 LTS.
2. Ubuntu Linux 16.0.4 LTS.
3. Ubuntu Linux 18.0.4 LTS.
4. Debian Linux 8 and 9 (latest) stable.

How to install Planet Venus on a Debian or Ubuntu Linux

Type the following apt-get command/apt command to install the same:
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get upgrade
$ sudo apt-get install planet-venus
OR
$ sudo apt update && sudo apt install planet-venus

How do I use planet venus?

Type the following command to create a default planet for planet.cyberciti.biz in /home/apache/domains/planet.cyberciti.biz/http:
$ mkdir -p /home/apache/domains/planet.cyberciti.biz/http
$ cd /home/apache/domains/planet.cyberciti.biz/http
$ planet --create linuxnews
To edit this default planet called linuxnews, enter:
$ cd linuxnews
$ vi planet.ini
Sample outputs:

# Global configuration
[Planet]
 
name            = nixCraft Linux News Planet 
link            = http://planet.cyberciti.biz/
owner_name      = nixCraft
owner_email     = webmaster@server1.cyberciti.biz
output_theme    = theme
cache_directory = cache
output_dir      = output
feed_timeout    = 20
items_per_page  = 60
log_level       = DEBUG
 
# RSS/Feed subscription configuration
# [Feed-RSS-URL]
# name = Web Site Name Here
 
[http://feeds.cyberciti.biz/Nixcraft-LinuxFreebsdSolarisTipsTricks]
name = nixCraft: Linux Tips, Hacks, Tutorials, And Ideas In Blog Format
 
[http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdotLinux]
name = Linux Stories From Slashdot
 
[http://www.reddit.com/r/linux/.rss]
name = Reddit /r/Linux

Save and close the file.

Build default planet right away

Type the following command:
$ planet --verbose planet.ini
Sample outputs:

INFO:planet.runner:Socket timeout set to 20 seconds
INFO:planet.runner:Building work queue
INFO:planet.runner:Updating feed http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdotLinux
INFO:planet.runner:Updating feed http://feeds.cyberciti.biz/Nixcraft-LinuxFreebsdSolarisTipsTricks
INFO:planet.runner:Updating feed http://www.reddit.com/r/linux/.rss
INFO:planet.runner:Loading cached data

Test the results in your favorite web-browser:
http://planet.cyberciti.biz/linuxnews/output/atom.html
OR
http://localhost/linuxnews/output/index.html
Test the RSS result in your preferred rss reader:
http://planet.cyberciti.biz/linuxnews/output/atom.html
OR
http://localhost/linuxnews/output/atom.html
Sample outputs:

Conclusion

You just learned how to setup “Planet Venus” software on a Debian or Ubuntu Linux. It is an awesome “river of news” feed reader. It downloads news feeds published by web sites and aggregates their content together into a single combined feed, latest news first. For more info see “Planet venus” project home page here.