freshrss service not working

[bfrascher]

First and foremost, thanks for this awesome collection of services. It has saved me a lot of time and effort with setup and maintenance, as well as allowed me to discover new useful services to try out.

The only issue I have encountered so far is, that I can't get the freshrss service to work. After setting it up (with the default values) I always get a 404 status code when accessing the "/freshrss" path on my server. I noticed the following error message, printed multiple times, in the logs of the mash-freshrss systemd service:

[unixd:alert] [pid 38] (1)Operation not permitted: AH02157: initgroups: unable to set groups for User www-data and Group 33

I tried this with multiple versions of the freshrss docker image, but always with the same result. Any help with this would be very much appreciated.

[spantaleev]

Thank you for the kind words! It's great to hear that the playbook is useful to you!

Perhaps @kinduff knows more about the current status of the FreshRSS service.

In the meantime, if you can dedicate a hostname to FreshRSS, you could try:

• adjusting freshrss_hostname to point to that hostname
• removing freshrss_path_prefix: /freshrss from your vars.yml file
• reinstalling
• checking if FreshRSS works on this hostname (without being hosted at a subpath). Perhaps subpath/prefix-hosting is experiencing issues for this service.

[kinduff]

Hello, I just gave it a try in a fresh server with the following configuration and is working as expected.

freshrss_enabled: true
freshrss_hostname: freshrss.example.com

In the other hand, the freshrss_path_prefix: /freshrss configuration does not work as expected. I will work on a fix and update this issue.

In the meantime, please use a subdomain to serve the application.

[bfrascher]

Thanks for the quick responses. It is also working for me with a dedicated subdomain and an empty path prefix, which is good enough for me.

However I got stuck in the installation process. I have the postgres service configured and want to use it as the database. I can see that a freshrss database and user have already been created. But I don't know the password for that user. I have tried to replicate the configured expression for the database password (derived from my generic secret key) directly in a python interpreter, alas the password didn't match. Is there a recommended way to read out the generated password, in order to enter it in the installation process?

[spantaleev]

Does FreshRSS ask you for the database password explicitly as some part of setup wizard?

If so, sounds like we need to update its installation docs and likely advise people to use an explicitly-specified password instead of the current one (auto-derived from the generic secret key).

You can switch to your own password by defining freshrss_database_password: SOMETHING_SECRET in your vars.yml file and re-running the installation (just run-tags install-postgres,install-freshrss,start). This will provoke the Postgres role to change the password for this database and will reconfigure FreshRSS to use the new password.

[bfrascher]

Yes, the setup wizard asks for which database to use and for postgres all connection options need to be entered explicitly (server, database name, user, password).

I have since set the password manually and was able to complete the setup, thanks.

[spantaleev]

In that case it seems like:

• group_vars/mash_servers should not try to auto-generate a password for FreshRSS (freshrss_database_password)
• validation tasks in the FreshRSS role should ensure that freshrss_database_password is non-empty
• docs/services/freshrss.md should require people to define freshrss_database_password in their vars.yml file

Validation tasks were already in place, so I've only had to tackle the other 2 things. I did that in 65fac6b

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The only remaining things to be solved in this issue is that inability to use freshrss_path_prefix.

I've added a note about it in this patch until a proper fix arrives: 67f62f5

[kinduff]

Thank you so much for adding a patch @spantaleev, you beat me to it 😝 Will provide an update once the path issue is solved.