I was trying to add a feed to MiniFlux (the rss service I use), and it kept throwing an error. So, I left it.

With Blackjack and…

Okay, I’m not ditching MiniFlux, just moving to the self hosted version. The error I was getting was a timed out error. This isn’t the fault of MiniFlux, just the site I was trying to add, blocking the hosted version of MiniFlux. So fine, I’ll do it myself.

Spinning up a MiniFlux instance was pretty easy. I just spun up a VM on my ProxMox server, and got to work. I went with the docker version, mainly because it was less work. All I had to do was install docker, copy the config, make some changes, and fire it off.

One trap I saw, is that the docker config they give you, makes an admin account. You need that to login and make your account, after that, you can delete it. But, you also need to remove that from the docker config afterwards. Other wise the next time you start it up, it’ll remake that default account.

With MiniFlux up and running, I used my Synology to set up some reverse proxy rules, and request an SSL cert. With that, I was done.

How Is It?

In short, the exact same of the hosted version. Though that site I was trying to add, worked this time.

The main difference is that, with control over my instance, I could change the refresh rate. The hosted version refreshes every 1-2 hours. That’s fine, but I would like just a touch more often. Hosting MiniFlux myself, I could change the config so it refreshed every 30min.

Was it worth it? For me, yeah. I had fun setting it up, the faster refresh rate it pretty nice. But not everyone will be down for it. Thankfully, the hosted version of MiniFlux is pretty cheep.