How to Self-Host Miniflux: Minimal RSS Reader 2026

TL;DR

Miniflux (AGPL 3.0, ~6.3K GitHub stars, Go) is a deliberately minimal RSS reader — fast, opinionated, and distraction-free. No categories, no tags, no themes. What you get: all your feeds in a single sorted list, full keyboard navigation, full-text fetching, and Google Reader + Fever APIs for third-party apps. The entire server is a single Go binary + PostgreSQL. Compare Miniflux vs FreshRSS: FreshRSS is richer (extensions, multiple views, categories); Miniflux is faster and deliberately simpler — closer to the old Google Reader's "river of news" philosophy.

Key Takeaways

Miniflux: AGPL 3.0, ~6.3K stars, Go — opinionated, minimal, keyboard-driven
Single Go binary: No PHP, no Redis, just Go + PostgreSQL
Full-text fetch: Retrieves full article content even for truncated feeds
Fever + Google Reader API: Works with Reeder, NetNewsWire, Fluent Reader
Scraper rules: Custom content extraction rules per website
No JavaScript bloat: Server-rendered UI, loads in milliseconds

Miniflux vs FreshRSS vs Feedly

Feature	Miniflux	FreshRSS	Feedly Pro
License	AGPL 3.0	AGPL 3.0	Proprietary
Cost	Free	Free	$8/mo
Language	Go	PHP	—
Database	PostgreSQL only	SQLite/PostgreSQL	Cloud
UI	Minimal, keyboard-first	Feature-rich	Rich
Categories	No (flat list)	Yes	Yes
Extensions	No	100+	No
Full-text fetch	Yes	Yes	Yes (AI)
Fever API	No	Yes	—
Google Reader API	Yes	Yes	—
RAM	~30MB	~50MB	—
GitHub Stars	~6.3K	~10K	—

Part 1: Docker Setup

# docker-compose.yml
services:
  miniflux:
    image: miniflux/miniflux:latest
    container_name: miniflux
    restart: unless-stopped
    ports:
      - "8080:8080"
    depends_on:
      db:
        condition: service_healthy
    environment:
      DATABASE_URL: postgres://miniflux:${POSTGRES_PASSWORD}@db/miniflux?sslmode=disable
      RUN_MIGRATIONS: "1"
      CREATE_ADMIN: "1"
      ADMIN_USERNAME: admin
      ADMIN_PASSWORD: "${ADMIN_PASSWORD}"
      POLLING_FREQUENCY: 15          # Feed refresh interval (minutes)
      POLLING_PARSING_ERROR_LIMIT: 3 # Disable feed after 3 errors
      WORKER_POOL_SIZE: 5            # Parallel feed fetchers
      BASE_URL: "https://rss.yourdomain.com"

  db:
    image: postgres:16-alpine
    restart: unless-stopped
    environment:
      POSTGRES_USER: miniflux
      POSTGRES_PASSWORD: "${POSTGRES_PASSWORD}"
      POSTGRES_DB: miniflux
    volumes:
      - postgres_data:/var/lib/postgresql/data
    healthcheck:
      test: ["CMD", "pg_isready", "-U", "miniflux"]
      interval: 10s
      start_period: 30s

volumes:
  postgres_data:

# .env
POSTGRES_PASSWORD=your-db-password
ADMIN_PASSWORD=your-admin-password

docker compose up -d

Visit http://your-server:8080 → log in as admin.

Part 2: HTTPS with Caddy

rss.yourdomain.com {
    reverse_proxy localhost:8080
}

Part 3: Import Feeds (OPML)

Settings → Import & Export → Import Feeds → upload OPML file
Miniflux starts fetching immediately

Export from:

Feedly: Settings → Import & Export → Export OPML
FreshRSS: Subscription → Import/Export → Export OPML
NewsBlur: Account → Import/Export → Download OPML

Miniflux is designed for keyboard-first use:

Key	Action
`j`	Next unread entry
`k`	Previous entry
`m`	Mark as read/unread
`v`	Open original URL
`f`	Toggle bookmark
`h`	Show help
`g u`	Go to unread
`g b`	Go to starred/bookmarks
`g h`	Go to history
`g f`	Go to feeds list
`R`	Refresh current feed

Part 5: Full-Text Fetching

For feeds that truncate articles:

Edit Feed → Fetch original content: Yes
Miniflux fetches the full article from the source

Custom Scraper Rules

For sites with complex layouts, add custom CSS selectors:

# Rules are stored in miniflux's "scraper_rules" database table
# Configure via the UI: Edit Feed → Scraper Rules

# Format: CSS selector for main content
# Example for a news site:
article.article-body, div.article-content

# Or use XPath:
# xpath:article//div[@class='content']

Miniflux also supports the Readability.js algorithm as fallback.

Part 6: Connect Mobile Apps

Enable API

Miniflux supports the Google Reader-compatible API:

API endpoint: https://rss.yourdomain.com/googlereader/reader/api/0

Reeder 5 (iOS/macOS):

Add account → Feedly (Google Reader-compatible)
URL: https://rss.yourdomain.com/googlereader/reader/api/0
Username + password

NetNewsWire:

Accounts → Add Account → Feedly
Use Google Reader API endpoint

Fluent Reader (Windows/Linux/macOS):

Settings → Account → Add → Miniflux
URL: https://rss.yourdomain.com
API key (generate in Miniflux settings)

API Key (simpler than password)

Settings → API Keys → Create API Key
Use in apps instead of username/password
More secure — revocable independently

Part 7: Fever API

Miniflux doesn't support Fever natively — use FreshRSS if Fever compatibility is required (e.g., for older clients like ReadKit or Mr. Reader on iOS).

For Miniflux, the Google Reader API covers most modern clients.

Part 8: Webhooks and Integrations

Miniflux can push new articles to external services:

Integration options (Settings → Integrations):

Apprise: Push notifications to 50+ services (Slack, Discord, Telegram, ntfy)
Webhook: POST to any URL when new articles arrive
Readwise: Sync highlights to Readwise
Wallabag: Save articles directly to Wallabag
Instapaper / Pocket: Send to read-later services
Pinboard: Bookmark new articles
Matrix: Post to Matrix room
Telegram Bot: Post new articles to Telegram

Webhook setup:

// Miniflux sends POST to your URL with:
{
  "event_type": "save_entry",
  "feed": {
    "id": 1,
    "title": "Hacker News",
    "feed_url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/rss"
  },
  "entry": {
    "id": 42,
    "url": "https://example.com/article",
    "title": "Interesting Article",
    "content": "Full article content here...",
    "published_at": "2026-03-09T10:00:00Z"
  }
}

Part 9: Filters

Filter entries automatically:

Edit Feed → Block List (regex): Hide entries matching patterns
```
sponsored|advertisement|promoted
```
Edit Feed → Keep List (regex): Only show entries matching:
```
rust|golang|typescript
```

Rules use Go regex syntax.

Part 10: Environment Tuning

Key environment variables for optimization:

environment:
  # Polling:
  POLLING_FREQUENCY: 15             # Minutes between refreshes
  BATCH_SIZE: 100                   # Feeds fetched per batch
  WORKER_POOL_SIZE: 5               # Parallel fetch workers
  
  # Cleanup:
  CLEANUP_FREQUENCY_HOURS: 24       # Run cleanup daily
  CLEANUP_ARCHIVE_UNREAD_DAYS: 60   # Keep unread entries for 60 days
  CLEANUP_ARCHIVE_READ_DAYS: 30     # Keep read entries for 30 days
  
  # Security:
  DISABLE_HTTP_SERVICE: "0"
  CERT_FILE: ""                     # Let Caddy handle TLS
  KEY_FILE: ""
  HTTPS_ONLY: "0"
  
  # Auth:
  AUTH_PROXY_HEADER: ""             # For SSO/proxy auth

Maintenance

# Update Miniflux:
docker compose pull
docker compose up -d

# Logs:
docker compose logs -f miniflux

# Backup database:
docker exec db pg_dump -U miniflux miniflux \
  | gzip > miniflux-db-$(date +%Y%m%d).sql.gz

# Reset admin password:
docker exec miniflux miniflux -reset-password

# Check feeds with errors:
# Settings → Feeds → Sort by "Parsing Error" — shows feeds that need attention

Why Self-Host Miniflux?

The case for self-hosting Miniflux comes down to three practical factors: data ownership, cost at scale, and operational control.

Data ownership is the fundamental argument. When you use a SaaS version of any tool, your data lives on someone else's infrastructure subject to their terms of service, their security practices, and their business continuity. If the vendor raises prices, gets acquired, changes API limits, or shuts down, you're left scrambling. Self-hosting Miniflux means your data and configuration stay on infrastructure you control — whether that's a VPS, a bare metal server, or a home lab.

Cost at scale matters once you move beyond individual use. Most SaaS equivalents charge per user or per data volume. A self-hosted instance on a $10-20/month VPS typically costs less than per-user SaaS pricing for teams of five or more — and the cost doesn't scale linearly with usage. One well-configured server handles dozens of users for a flat monthly fee.

Operational control is the third factor. The Docker Compose configuration above exposes every setting that commercial equivalents often hide behind enterprise plans: custom networking, environment variables, storage backends, and authentication integrations. You decide when to update, how to configure backups, and what access controls to apply.

The honest tradeoff: you're responsible for updates, backups, and availability. For teams running any production workloads, this is familiar territory. For individuals, the learning curve is real but the tooling (Docker, Caddy, automated backups) is well-documented and widely supported.

Server Requirements and Sizing

Before deploying Miniflux, assess your server capacity against expected workload.

Minimum viable setup: A 1 vCPU, 1GB RAM VPS with 20GB SSD is sufficient for personal use or small teams. Most consumer VPS providers — Hetzner, DigitalOcean, Linode, Vultr — offer machines in this range for $5-10/month. Hetzner offers excellent price-to-performance for European and US regions.

Recommended production setup: 2 vCPUs with 4GB RAM and 40GB SSD handles most medium deployments without resource contention. This gives Miniflux headroom for background tasks, caching, and concurrent users while leaving capacity for other services on the same host.

Storage planning: The Docker volumes in this docker-compose.yml store all persistent Miniflux data. Estimate your storage growth rate early — for data-intensive tools, budget for 3-5x your initial estimate. Hetzner Cloud and Vultr both support online volume resizing without stopping your instance.

Operating system: Any modern 64-bit Linux distribution works. Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and Debian 12 are the most commonly tested configurations. Ensure Docker Engine 24.0+ and Docker Compose v2 are installed — verify with docker --version and docker compose version. Avoid Docker Desktop on production Linux servers; it adds virtualization overhead and behaves differently from Docker Engine in ways that cause subtle networking issues.

Network: Only ports 80 and 443 need to be publicly accessible when running behind a reverse proxy. Internal service ports should be bound to localhost only. A minimal UFW firewall that blocks all inbound traffic except SSH, HTTP, and HTTPS is the single most effective security measure for a self-hosted server.

Backup and Disaster Recovery

Running Miniflux without a tested backup strategy is an unacceptable availability risk. Docker volumes are not automatically backed up — if you delete a volume or the host fails, data is gone with no recovery path.

What to back up: The named Docker volumes containing Miniflux's data (database files, user uploads, application state), your docker-compose.yml and any customized configuration files, and .env files containing secrets.

Backup approach: For simple setups, stop the container, archive the volume contents, then restart. For production environments where stopping causes disruption, use filesystem snapshots or database dump commands (PostgreSQL pg_dump, SQLite .backup, MySQL mysqldump) that produce consistent backups without downtime.

For a complete automated backup workflow that ships snapshots to S3-compatible object storage, see the Restic + Rclone backup guide. Restic handles deduplication and encryption; Rclone handles multi-destination uploads. The same setup works for any Docker volume.

Backup cadence: Daily backups to remote storage are a reasonable baseline for actively used tools. Use a 30-day retention window minimum — long enough to recover from mistakes discovered weeks later. For critical data, extend to 90 days and use a secondary destination.

Restore testing: A backup that has never been restored is a backup you cannot trust. Once a month, restore your Miniflux backup to a separate Docker Compose stack on different ports and verify the data is intact. This catches silent backup failures, script errors, and volume permission issues before they matter in a real recovery.

Security Hardening

Self-hosting means you are responsible for Miniflux's security posture. The Docker Compose setup provides a functional base; production deployments need additional hardening.

Always use a reverse proxy: Never expose Miniflux's internal port directly to the internet. The docker-compose.yml binds to localhost; Caddy or Nginx provides HTTPS termination. Direct HTTP access transmits credentials in plaintext. A reverse proxy also centralizes TLS management, rate limiting, and access logging.

Strong credentials: Change default passwords immediately after first login. For secrets in docker-compose environment variables, generate random values with openssl rand -base64 32 rather than reusing existing passwords.

Firewall configuration:

ufw default deny incoming
ufw allow 22/tcp
ufw allow 80/tcp
ufw allow 443/tcp
ufw enable

Internal service ports (databases, admin panels, internal APIs) should only be reachable from localhost or the Docker network, never directly from the internet.

Network isolation: Docker Compose named networks keep Miniflux's services isolated from other containers on the same host. Database containers should not share networks with containers that don't need direct database access.

VPN access for sensitive services: For internal-only tools, restricting access to a VPN adds a strong second layer. Headscale is an open source Tailscale control server that puts your self-hosted stack behind a WireGuard mesh, eliminating public internet exposure for internal tools.

Update discipline: Subscribe to Miniflux's GitHub releases page to receive security advisory notifications. Schedule a monthly maintenance window to pull updated images. Running outdated container images is the most common cause of self-hosted service compromises.

Troubleshooting Common Issues

Container exits immediately or won't start

Check logs first — they almost always explain the failure:

docker compose logs -f miniflux

Common causes: a missing required environment variable, a port already in use, or a volume permission error. Port conflicts appear as bind: address already in use. Find the conflicting process with ss -tlpn | grep PORT and either stop it or change Miniflux's port mapping in docker-compose.yml.

Cannot reach the web interface

Work through this checklist:

Confirm the container is running: docker compose ps
Test locally on the server: curl -I http://localhost:PORT
If local access works but external doesn't, check your firewall: ufw status
If using a reverse proxy, verify it's running and the config is valid: caddy validate --config /etc/caddy/Caddyfile

Permission errors on volume mounts

Some containers run as a non-root user. If the Docker volume is owned by root, the container process cannot write to it. Find the volume's host path with docker volume inspect VOLUME_NAME, check the tool's documentation for its expected UID, and apply correct ownership:

chown -R 1000:1000 /var/lib/docker/volumes/your_volume/_data

High resource usage over time

Memory or CPU growing continuously usually indicates unconfigured log rotation, an unbound cache, or accumulated data needing pruning. Check current usage with docker stats miniflux. Add resource limits in docker-compose.yml to prevent one container from starving others. For ongoing visibility into resource trends, deploy Prometheus + Grafana or Netdata.

Data disappears after container restart

Data stored in the container's writable layer — rather than a named volume — is lost when the container is removed or recreated. This happens when the volume mount path in docker-compose.yml doesn't match where the application writes data. Verify mount paths against the tool's documentation and correct the mapping. Named volumes persist across container removal; only docker compose down -v deletes them.

Keeping Miniflux Updated

Miniflux follows a regular release cadence. Staying current matters for security patches and compatibility. The update process with Docker Compose is straightforward:

docker compose pull          # Download updated images
docker compose up -d         # Restart with new images
docker image prune -f        # Remove old image layers (optional)

Read the changelog before major version updates. Some releases include database migrations or breaking configuration changes. For major version bumps, test in a staging environment first — run a copy of the service on different ports with the same volume data to validate the migration before touching production.

Version pinning: For stability, pin to a specific image tag in docker-compose.yml instead of latest. Update deliberately after reviewing the changelog. This trades automatic patch delivery for predictable behavior — the right call for business-critical services.

Post-update verification: After updating, confirm Miniflux is functioning correctly. Most services expose a /health endpoint that returns HTTP 200 — curl it from the server or monitor it with your uptime tool.

See all open source news and RSS tools at OSSAlt.com/categories/productivity.