How does Clawfeed differ from RSSHub?

[Clawfeed](https://github.com/kevinho/clawfeed) focuses on turning a small set of critical pages into long-running feed pipelines with controlled refresh, deduplication, and stable outputs, which fits teams that want reliability-first ingestion. [RSSHub](https://github.com/DIYgod/RSSHub) is closer to a route catalog with a large ecosystem of rules and broad coverage. Choose based on intent: if you want breadth and ready-made routes, RSSHub is usually faster; if you want high reliability and controllable policies for a few sources, Clawfeed is a tighter fit.

What’s the trade-off vs RSS-Bridge?

[RSS-Bridge](https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge) is a collection of bridges, great for quickly filling missing feeds with a lightweight setup. [Clawfeed](https://github.com/kevinho/clawfeed) is more of an operable scraping-to-feed pipeline where refresh, caching, alerting, and isolation are first-class. If you only need a handful of bridges, RSS-Bridge can be enough; if you run feeds as a long-lived service, Clawfeed tends to feel more engineered.

How do I prevent subscriber growth from exploding upstream requests?

Switch from request-driven fetching to timer-driven refresh: refresh once per interval and serve subscribers from cache. Use longer TTLs for hot sources and apply backoff retries on failures to avoid hammering upstreams. Add rate limits and isolate login-dependent sources into separate configs or instances to protect both credentials and resources.

Clawfeed Deep Dive: Self-Hosted Web-to-RSS Alternative

Pain Points vs Innovation

✕Traditional Pain Points	✓Innovative Solutions
Many sources ship no RSS, forcing teams into notifications or manual checks with delays, weak traceability, and poor archiving.	Clawfeed engineers web extraction into feed generation: rule-driven scraping, controlled refresh, and cacheable outputs that turn feeds into an operable capability.
Readers are good at consuming feeds but not producing them, especially when auth, caching, filtering, and stable refresh are required.	It focuses on self-hosting and composability so RSS/Atom outputs work with any reader while supporting isolation, rate limits, and alerting for team needs.

Deployment Guide

1. Clone the repo and install dependencies (choose npm/pnpm per docs)

bash

1git clone https://github.com/kevinho/clawfeed.git && cd clawfeed && npm i

2. Configure runtime and refresh policy (targets, intervals, cache)

bash

1cp .env.example .env && sed -i '' 's/REFRESH_INTERVAL=.*/REFRESH_INTERVAL=300/' .env

3. Start locally and verify generated feed output

bash

1npm run dev

4. Containerize for production and add health checks and rate limits

bash

1docker build -t clawfeed:latest . && docker run -d --name clawfeed -p 1200:1200 clawfeed:latest

Use Cases

Core Scene	Target Audience	Solution	Outcome
Competitive & Product Update Monitoring	Ops and Product Managers	Convert changelogs and announcement pages into RSS with alerts	Catch changes early with auditability
Intranet Collection and Archiving	Enterprise IT and Security Teams	Self-host and standardize external updates into RSS with access control	Less external dependency and better traceability
Update Signal Layer for Data Pipelines	Data Engineers	Use RSS/Atom as a unified change signal into ETL and workflows	Lower scraper maintenance and improved stability

Clawfeed

What is it?

Pain Points vs Innovation

Architecture Deep Dive

Deployment Guide

1. Clone the repo and install dependencies (choose npm/pnpm per docs)

2. Configure runtime and refresh policy (targets, intervals, cache)

3. Start locally and verify generated feed output

4. Containerize for production and add health checks and rate limits

Use Cases

Limitations & Gotchas

Frequently Asked Questions