FreshRSS/docs/en/users/06_Fever_API.md

FreshRSS - Fever API implementation

RSS clients

There are many RSS clients existing supporting Fever APIs but they seem to understand the Fever API a bit differently. If your favourite client does not work properly with this API, create an issue and we will have a look. But we can only do that for free clients.

Usage & Authentication

Before you can start to use this API, you have to enable and setup API access, which is documented here, and then re-set the user’s API password.

Then point your mobile application to the URL of fever.php (e.g. https://freshrss.example.net/api/fever.php).

Compatibility

Tested with:

• iOS

  • Fiery Feeds
  • Unread

• MacOS

  • Readkit

• Android -Until now, we don't know about compatible Android clients. Please leave your feedback, if you tested the Fever API with Android apps.

  • Please note, that Press is NOT compatible: it was a popular RSS client with Fever support, but its development stopped a while ago. It uses the Fever API in a wrong way, which we don't support.

Features

Following features are implemented:

• fetching categories
• fetching feeds
• fetching RSS items (new, favorites, unread, by_id, by_feed, by_category, since)
• fetching favicons
• setting read marker for item(s)
• setting starred marker for item(s)
• setting read marker for feed
• setting read marker for category
• supports FreshRSS extensions, which use th entry_before_display hook

Following features are not supported:

• Hot Links aka hot as there is nothing in FreshRSS yet that is similar or could be used to simulate it

Testing and error search

If this API does not work as expected in your RSS reader, you can test it manually with a tool like Postman.

Configure a POST request to the URL https://freshrss.example.net/api/fever.php?api which should give you the result:

{
	"api_version": 3,
	"auth": 0
}

Great, the base setup seems to work!

Now lets try an authenticated call. Fever uses an api_key, which is the MD5 hash of "$username:$apiPassword". Assuming the user is kevin and the password freshrss, here is a command-line example to compute the resulting api_key

api_key=`echo -n "kevin:freshrss" | md5sum | cut -d' ' -f1`

Add a body to your POST request encoded as form-data and one key named api_key with the value your-password-hash:

curl -s -F "api_key=$api_key" 'https://freshrss.example.net/api/fever.php?api'

This shoud give:

{
	"api_version": 3,
	"auth": 1,
	"last_refreshed_on_time": "1520013061"
}

Perfect, you are authenticated and can now start testing the more advanced features. Therefor change the URL and append the possible API actions to your request parameters. Check the original Fever documentation for more infos.

Some basic calls are:

• https://freshrss.example.net/api/fever.php?api&items
• https://freshrss.example.net/api/fever.php?api&feeds
• https://freshrss.example.net/api/fever.php?api&groups
• https://freshrss.example.net/api/fever.php?api&unread_item_ids
• https://freshrss.example.net/api/fever.php?api&saved_item_ids
• https://freshrss.example.net/api/fever.php?api&items&since_id=some_id
• https://freshrss.example.net/api/fever.php?api&items&max_id=some_id
• https://freshrss.example.net/api/fever.php?api&mark=item&as=read&id=some_id
• https://freshrss.example.net/api/fever.php?api&mark=item&as=unread&id=some_id

Replace some_id with a real ID from your freshrss_username_entry database.

Debugging

If nothing helps and your clients still misbehaves, add these lines to the start of fever.api:

file_put_contents(__DIR__ . '/fever.log', $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'] . ': ' . json_encode($_REQUEST) . PHP_EOL, FILE_APPEND);

Then use your RSS client to query the API and afterwards check the file fever.log.

Credits

This plugin was inspired by the tinytinyrss-fever-plugin.