Watchtower-News is a topic-based news-feed generator.

• Collect fresh and popular news, articles and blog posts around topics that you define.
• The news-feed(s) are automatically generated and accessible through a Rest API.
• The system is self-hosted and open source.

In a project we have needed to curate news, articles, blog posts for a (maker) community. We evaluated different solutions:

• We didn’t have enough budget for commercial solutions: newsapi.org, webhose.io, datastreamer.io, twingly, Aylien News API.

• News-please and twitter-news require to specify URL of news websites and twitter handles respectively. We didn’t want to create and maintain such lists. Since the content is technical and the sources are spread around many websites / twitter accounts.

1. Collect tweets containing keywords that you define via Twitter Streaming API,
2. For a tweet contaning a link, follow the link to the end,
3. Process the content: get the title, publish date, predict the language, summarize the content, select a representative image,
4. Store the raw and the processed data on a database (MongoDB),
5. The news-feed is accesible through an API.

• Install Docker and Docker Compose
• Create a Twitter App from https://apps.twitter.com/

$ cp .env-example .env

Fill the .env file with a text editor.

$ bash run.sh

This project is licensed under the MIT License.