Installation Tutorials

Here are a couple of tutorials to help you to install Miniflux (They are only examples).

Installing Miniflux on your own server

Ubuntu 16.04

1. Install Postgresql: apt install postgresql
2. Prepare the database:

# Switch to the postgres user
$ su - postgres

# Create a database user for Miniflux
$ createuser -P miniflux
Enter password for new role: ******
Enter it again: ******

# Create a database for miniflux that belongs to our user
$ createdb -O miniflux miniflux

# Create the extension hstore as superuser
$ psql miniflux -c 'create extension hstore'
CREATE EXTENSION

3. Install Miniflux:

# Download the latest Debian package from the release page
# In this example, this is the version 2.0.10
$ wget https://github.com/miniflux/miniflux/releases/download/2.0.10/miniflux_2.0.10_amd64.deb

# Install the package
$ dpkg -i miniflux_2.0.10_amd64.deb

# Run the SQL migrations
$ export DATABASE_URL=postgres://miniflux:[email protected]/miniflux?sslmode=disable
$ miniflux -migrate
Current schema version: 0
Latest schema version: 16
Migrating to version: 1
Migrating to version: 2
Migrating to version: 3
[...]

# Create the first user
$ miniflux -create-admin
Enter Username: superman
Enter Password: ******

# Update the config file /etc/miniflux.conf
# Add/Edit this lines:
# DATABASE_URL=postgres://miniflux:[email protected]/miniflux?sslmode=disable
# LISTEN_ADDR=0.0.0.0:80
$ vim /etc/miniflux.conf

# Authorize Miniflux to listen on port 80
$ setcap cap_net_bind_service=+ep /usr/bin/miniflux

# Restart the process to take the new config values into consideration
systemctl restart miniflux

# Check the logs to make sure the process is running properly
$ journalctl -u miniflux
[INFO] Starting Miniflux...
[INFO] [Worker] #0 started
[INFO] [Worker] #1 started
[INFO] [Worker] #2 started
[INFO] [Worker] #3 started
[INFO] Listening on "0.0.0.0:80" without TLS

4. Now, you can access to your Miniflux instance via http://your-server/

Fedora 28

Database installation and configuration:

1. Install Postgresql: sudo dnf install -y postgresql-server postgresql-contrib
2. Enable Postgres service: sudo systemctl enable postgresql
3. Initialize the database: sudo postgresql-setup --initdb --unit postgresql
4. Start Postgres service: sudo systemctl start postgresql
5. Create Miniflux database user: sudo su - postgres and createuser -P miniflux
6. Create Miniflux database: createdb -O miniflux miniflux
7. Create HSTORE extension: psql miniflux -c 'create extension hstore'

Note

More information available on the Fedora Wiki.

Miniflux installation:

1. Install RPM package:

sudo dnf install https://github.com/miniflux/miniflux/releases/download/2.0.10/miniflux-2.0.10-1.0.x86_64.rpm

2. Run SQL migrations and create first user:

export DATABASE_URL=postgres://miniflux:[email protected]/miniflux?sslmode=disable

# Create database structure:
miniflux -migrate

# Create frist user:
miniflux -create-admin

3. Start the service:

systemctl enable miniflux
systemctl start miniflux

# To watch the logs:
journalctl -f -u miniflux

5. Access your Miniflux instance via http://your-server:8080/

Running Miniflux with Docker Compose

You could use Docker to try quickly Miniflux on your local machine:

Create a docker-compose.yml file into a folder called miniflux for example.

version: '3'
services:
  miniflux:
    image: miniflux/miniflux:latest
    ports:
      - "80:8080"
    depends_on:
      - db
    environment:
      - DATABASE_URL=postgres://miniflux:[email protected]/miniflux?sslmode=disable
      - RUN_MIGRATIONS=1
      - CREATE_ADMIN=1
      - ADMIN_USERNAME=admin
      - ADMIN_PASSWORD=test123
  db:
    image: postgres:10.1
    environment:
      - POSTGRES_USER=miniflux
      - POSTGRES_PASSWORD=secret
    volumes:
      - miniflux-db:/var/lib/postgresql/data
volumes:
  miniflux-db:

Then run docker-compose up and go to http://localhost/.

After the first user has been created, you should remove the variables CREATE_ADMIN, ADMIN_USERNAME and ADMIN_PASSWORD.

Deploying Miniflux on Heroku

Since the version 2.0.6, you can deploy Miniflux on Heroku in few seconds.

1. Clone the repository on your machine: git clone https://github.com/miniflux/miniflux.git
2. Switch to a stable version, for example git checkout 2.0.10 (master is the development branch)
3. Create a new Heroku application: heroku apps:create
4. Add the Postgresql addon: heroku addons:create heroku-postgresql:hobby-dev
5. Add environment variables to setup the application:

# This parameter will create all tables in the database.
heroku config:set RUN_MIGRATIONS=1

# The following parameters will create the first user.
heroku config:set CREATE_ADMIN=1
heroku config:set ADMIN_USERNAME=admin
heroku config:set ADMIN_PASSWORD=test123

6. Deploy the application on Heroku: git push heroku master
7. After the application is installed successfully, you don’t need these variables anymore:

heroku config:unset CREATE_ADMIN
heroku config:unset ADMIN_USERNAME
heroku config:unset ADMIN_PASSWORD

• To watch the logs, use heroku logs.
• You can also run a one-off container to run the commands manually: heroku run bash. The Miniflux binary will be located into the folder bin.
• To update Miniflux, pull the new version from the repository and push to Heroku again.

Deploying Miniflux on AlwaysData

AlwaysData is a French shared hosting provider. You can install Miniflux in few minutes on their platform.

1. Open an account
2. Via the admin panel, create a Postgresql database and define a user/password
3. Create a website, choose “User Program”, use a custom shell-script, for example ~/start.sh

4. Enable the SSH access and open a session ssh account@ssh-account.alwaysdata.net
5. Install Miniflux:

wget https://github.com/miniflux/miniflux/releases/download/2.0.10/miniflux-linux-amd64
mv miniflux-linux-amd64 miniflux
chmod +x miniflux

6. Create a shell script to start miniflux, let’s call it start.sh:

#!/bin/sh

export LISTEN_ADDR=$ALWAYSDATA_HTTPD_IP:$ALWAYSDATA_HTTPD_PORT
export DATABASE_URL="host=postgresql-xxxxx.alwaysdata.net dbname=xxxx user=xxxx password=xxx sslmode=disable"

~/miniflux

7. Make the script executable: chmod +x start.sh
8. Run the db migrations and a create the first user:

export DATABASE_URL=".... replace me...."
./miniflux -migrate
./miniflux -create-admin

9. Go to https://your-account.alwaysdata.net

Via the admin panel, in Advanced > Processes, you can even see the Miniflux process running: