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Adam Harrison-Fuller authored
Signed-off-by: default avatarAdam Harrison-Fuller <adam@adamhf.io>
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Gitlab RSS Sync

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Create Gitlab issues from RSS Feeds with optional labelling. Created to monitor RSS feeds and bring posts to our attention (Security Releases, Product Updates etc)

Avoiding Duplication

We try to be as clever as is reasonably possible in terms of not duplicating RSS feed items into Gitlab. A Redis DB is used to store the GUID/FeedID combination which is checked when assessing articles for synchronisation. In addition we also add the RSS feed's item GUID at the bottom of the issue description. Before synchronising an RSS item we run an issue search in the associated project, if we dont find the GUID in any issue we assume its not already been created. This helps to guard against scenarios where you lose the Redis DB and dont want RSS items reduplicating into Gitlab. If found in Gitlab it is marked as synchronised in the local database as well as printing an link to the existing issue(s) to stdout.

Limiting what is initially synced.

Each feed entry in the config file can have an "added_since" property set. This is used to only sync RSS items that have a Published/Updated date greater than the provided value. This can be useful on RSS feeds where you dont want to import historic items, just new posts going forward.

Config file

The config file MUST be named config.yaml, an example one is provided here. Below is a brief description of its contents.

interval: 300
feeds:
  - id: test 
    feed_url: http://example.com/rss.xml
    name: Test Feed
    gitlab_project_id: 12345
    added_since: "2019-03-27T15:00:00Z"
    labels:
      - TestLabel
   - id: feed2
     ...

Global

Attribute Type Required Description
interval int yes The interval in seconds between feed checks

Feeds

Attribute Type Required Description
id string yes A feed ID that is used internally for duplicate detection.
feed_url string yes The URL of the feed
name string yes A User friendly display name.
gitlab_project_id int yes The Gitlab project ID to create issues under.
added_since string no For longer RSS feeds specify a ISO 8601 DateTime to exclude items published/updated earlier than this
Labels Array no A list of labels to add to created Issues

Docker

A Docker image is made available on DockerHub

Required Environment Variables

  • GITLAB_API_TOKEN - Gitlab personal access token that will be used to create Issues NOTE: You must have access to create issues in the projects you specify in the config file.
  • CONFIG_DIR - The directory the application should look for config.yaml in.
  • REDIS_URL - The URL of the Redis host e.g. redis:6379
  • REDIS_PASSWORD - Password for Redis, if an empty password is required set to REDIS_PASSWORD=

Run it

Via Docker

docker run -e GITLAB_API_TOKEN=<INSERT_TOKEN> -e DATA_DIR=/data -e CONFIG_DIR=/app -v REDIS_URL=<REDIS_URL> -v REDIS_PASSWORD=<REDIS_PASSWORD> -v <PATH_TO_CONFIG_DIR>/config adamhf/rss-sync:latest

####Via docker-compose

docker-compose up```



## Prometheus Metrics
Two metrics (above and beyond what are exposed by the Go Prometheus library) are exposed on :8080/metrics
* last_run_time - The time of the last feed checks, useful for creating alerts to check for successful runs.
* issues_created - The total number of issues created in Gitlab, useful to check for runaways.

## Example Issues
### GKE Release Notes
Feed URL: https://cloud.google.com/feeds/kubernetes-engine-release-notes.xml
![GKE Release Notes](screenshots/GKEReleaseNotes.png "GKE Release Notes")
### GKE Security Updates
Feed URL: https://cloud.google.com/feeds/kubernetes-engine-security-bulletins.xml
![GKE Security updates](screenshots/GKESecurityUpdate.png "GKE Security updates")


## TODO
* Make the retroactive setting of the Gitlab creation time optional.