Dumping unread RSS items from Selfoss

I’ve recently gone through somewhat of a RSS (r)evolution recently, finding myself switching from the excellent web based Selfoss to the command line Newsboat application and then wanting multiple clients across multiple platforms (without awkwardly syncing a database) using Tiny Tiny RSS as my server, with Newsboat, the Web UI and the FOSS Android client all as clients working flawlessly.

During migrations around the place however you’ll inevitably end up with multiple running RSS readers, all updating independently, duplicating unread items. An easy solution to this that I overlooked for far far too long, is to just dump your unread items to a text file, and work through them at your own pace.

To do this, follow away. I was using the docker container so my persistent storage database selfoss.db was mounted on my host file system which made finding and copying it incredibly easy. Move this to a location where you can work on it, then install the sqlite binary using your package manager.

You can now dump your unread items using:

sqlite3 -csv -noheader selfoss.db "select author, title, link from items where unread = 1;" > selfoss.csv

You can tidy up the formatting a little with sed, but I just sort and deduplicate the list with uniq and start whittling away.