Install Fresh RSS on CentOS / RHEL

Tutorial on how to install Fresh RSS on CentOS 8.

Prerequisites

This tutorial assumes you know how to install and setup LAMP stack and will not get to details on that. If you need more info about it, look here –

How to install LAMP stack on CentOS / Red Hat

Enable EPEL and REMI repos

sudo dnf install https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-8.noarch.rpm

sudo dnf install https://rpms.remirepo.net/enterprise/remi-release-8.rpm

Get your CentOS install up to date by issuing

sudo yum update -y

Install and enable PHP

sudo dnf module enable php:remi-7.4

Install PHP and needed modules

sudo yum install php php-curl php-gmp php-intl php-mbstring php-sqlite3 php-xml php-zip

Apache and MariaDB

We will also install Apache and MariaDB as our DB server

sudo yum install httpd mariadb-server mariadb -y

Enable Apache and MariaDB

sudo systemctl enable --now httpd.service mariadb.service

MariaDB config

We will now make initial configuration of our MariaDB

sudo mysql_secure_installation

After that is done, we will create DB for our FreshRSS, create user and add all rights to that user.

mysql -u root -p

CREATE DATABASE freshrss;
CREATE USER `zeljko`@`localhost` IDENTIFIED BY 'pass01';
GRANT ALL ON freshrss.* TO `zeljko`@`localhost`;
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
exit

Thats it, we created freshrss DB and user for it.

Apache config

After you are done with db, we will continue with Apache and create freshrss.conf file in /etc/httpd/conf.d/

sudo vi /etc/httpd/conf.d/freshrss.conf

Enter following (change rss.example.net for your ip or domain) and change /path/to/FreshRSS to your path where Fresh RSS

<VirtualHost *:80>
	ServerName rss.example.net
	DocumentRoot /path/to/FreshRSS/p/

	<Directory /path/to/FreshRSS/p>
		AllowOverride AuthConfig FileInfo Indexes Limit
		Require all granted
	</Directory>

	ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/freshrss_error.log
	CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/freshrss_access.log combined

	AllowEncodedSlashes On
</VirtualHost>

Here is how my configuration looks like

If you wish to enable HTTPS / SSL – and you definitely WANT THAT in production, you will also need this part for the document. For my production I use exclusively HTTPS:443, without HTTP.

<IfModule mod_ssl.c>
	<VirtualHost *:443>
		ServerName rss.example.net
		DocumentRoot /path/to/FreshRSS/p/

		<Directory /path/to/FreshRSS/p>
			AllowOverride AuthConfig FileInfo Indexes Limit
			Require all granted
		</Directory>

		ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/freshrss_error.log
		CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/freshrss_access.log combined

		<IfModule mod_http2.c>
			Protocols h2 http/1.1
		</IfModule>

		# For the API
		AllowEncodedSlashes On

		SSLEngine on
		SSLCompression off
		SSLCertificateFile /path/to/server.crt
		SSLCertificateKeyFile /path/to/server.key
		# Additional SSL configuration, e.g. with LetsEncrypt
	</VirtualHost>
</IfModule>

After you are done with this config, we need to restart Apache

sudo systemctl restart httpd

Fresh RSS installation

First, we need to install git.

sudo yum install git

Change to /var/www directory

cd /var/www

Clone git repo

sudo git clone https://github.com/FreshRSS/FreshRSS.git

Change permissions on your FreshRSS directory

sudo chown -R apache:apache /var/www/FreshRSS

Enter FreshRSS directory by entering

cd FreshRSS

We need to give web server write permissions for data directory and subdirectories.

sudo chown -R :apache . && sudo chmod -R g+r . && sudo chmod -R g+w ./data/

Optionally, if you would like to update FreshRSS from web interface, you will also need

sudo chmod -R g+w .

One last thing on CentOS, I haven’t found a way to force exceptions for FreshRSS in SELinux – everything I tried didn’t work for me (please let me know if you have working solution). You will have to put SELinux in permissive mode. Command below will put SELinux in permissive mode temporarily, until reboot. Look through other tutorials to put SELinux permanently into permissive mode.

sudo setenforce 0

03.05.2023 - thanks to Pim Aarts who was kind to let me know working solution for SELinux. We have working SELinux for FreshRSS on Rocky Linux 9 (in case settings down don't work for you, you can always use "setenforce 0" command I wrote above)

sudo semanage fcontext -a -t httpd_sys_rw_content_t "/var/www/FreshRSS/data(/.*)?"
sudo restorecon -R -v "/var/www/FreshRSS/data”
sudo setsebool -P httpd_can_network_connect on

We also need to allow traffic through firewall

sudo firewall-cmd --add-service http --permanent
sudo firewall-cmd --reload

If you done everything correctly, when you enter your ip or name in browser mine is (http://192.168.2.22) you will get following screen

Ok, I will select English and go to the next step

Next step will check all the prerequisites for successful install. If you followed this tutorial correctly, you should be in green. Go to the next step