Drift

A calm, fast, distraction-free RSS reader. Server-rendered Rails 8 + Hotwire, no SPA, no AI summaries, no social features — just feeds.

Stack

• Ruby 4.0 / Rails 8 (main)
• PostgreSQL (full-text search via tsvector)
• Hotwire (Turbo + Stimulus)
• Tailwind CSS v4
• Solid Queue (background jobs + recurring scheduler)
• Feedjira (parsing) + Faraday (HTTP, ETag/If-Modified-Since/redirects)

Authentication

Built on the Rails 8 bin/rails generate authentication flow:

• User with has_secure_password and email_address
• Session records (DB-backed) keyed by a signed httponly cookie
• Authentication controller concern with before_action :require_authentication and allow_unauthenticated_access for the sign-in / sign-up / password-reset paths
• Current.user / Current.session for thread-local access
• Generator-shipped password reset emails (PasswordsController)
• Drift adds a thin RegistrationsController on top for sign-up

Models

• User — email_address + has_secure_password
• Session — per-device login record (Rails 8 generator)
• Feed — feed URL, ETag/Last-Modified, last-fetch metadata
• Subscription — joins user ↔ feed (custom title)
• Entry — feed item with FTS search_vector
• UserEntry — per-user read_at / starred_at

Run it

# 1. Start Postgres (Docker is the easiest path):
docker compose up -d postgres

# 2. Copy .env.example to .env and fill in your local Postgres creds.
cp .env.example .env

# 3. Install gems and bootstrap the DB:
bundle install
bin/rails db:create db:migrate db:seed

# 4. Start the app + Tailwind watcher + Solid Queue worker:
bin/dev

Open http://localhost:3000. Seeded login: demo@drift.local / drift1234.

Environment variables

Drift uses Rails 8.2's built-in .env support (no dotenv-rails gem). Values in .env are read via Rails.application.dotenvs and combined into Rails.app.creds alongside real ENV and config/credentials.yml.enc. The .env file is not loaded into ENV automatically — config files look up values explicitly:

username: <%%= Rails.application.creds.option(:database_username) %>

In production, set the same keys as real environment variables (they take precedence over .env).

Production domain

Set APP_HOST to the canonical public domain before booting production. Rails uses it for absolute URLs, including password reset emails, and Kamal uses it for the proxy host.

APP_HOST=rdrift.app
APP_HOSTS=rdrift.app,www.rdrift.app # optional aliases
APP_PROTOCOL=https

If Kamal terminates TLS through its proxy, keep the default FORCE_SSL=true and point DNS at the server before deploying so Let's Encrypt can issue the certificate. For local production-style Docker compose, FORCE_SSL=false is set with APP_HOST=drift.local.

Sending email

Drift sends one transactional email — the password-reset link — delivered asynchronously through Solid Queue. Production reads SMTP settings entirely from the environment (on ONCE these come from the host's mail settings UI):

SMTP_ADDRESS=smtp.example.com      # required to enable delivery
SMTP_PORT=587                      # optional, defaults to 587
SMTP_USERNAME=...                  # optional
SMTP_PASSWORD=...                  # optional
SMTP_AUTHENTICATION=plain          # optional, defaults to plain
MAILER_FROM_ADDRESS="Drift <no-reply@example.com>"

Until SMTP_ADDRESS is set, mail delivery stays off — the app boots fine and queued reset emails are dropped rather than retried forever. Bring any SMTP provider (Postmark, SES, Resend, Fastmail, …); no provider gem is required.

Background jobs

Solid Queue runs in-process via bin/jobs (started by bin/dev). A recurring RefreshDueFeedsJob enqueues a FeedRefreshJob for each feed that hasn't been fetched in the last 30 minutes (see config/recurring.yml).

To refresh a single feed manually:

FeedRefreshJob.perform_now(Feed.first.id)

Bilibili feeds

Pasting a space.bilibili.com/<uid> address subscribes to that user's video uploads. Intended for personal use and off by default in production — see docs/bilibili-feeds.md.

Search

Full-text search uses Postgres tsvector with websearch_to_tsquery, ranking title (A) > summary (B) > content (C) > author (D). The vector is maintained in the Entry model's before_save.

Tests

bin/rails test

Backups

Production drift_production is dumped every few hours and pushed off-server to S3-compatible object storage (R2 / B2) by a Kamal backup accessory — a sidecar built from official postgres:16 + AWS CLI. Tooling lives in backup/; setup, retention, and restore drills are in docs/backups.md.

License

Drift is free software, licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 (AGPL-3.0). See LICENSE. In short: you may use, modify, and self-host it, but if you run a modified version as a network service, you must make your source available to its users under the same license.