Frequently Asked Questions

I'm using lastpass and stuff is broken

Lastpass arbitrarily breaks tt-rss forms preventing various stuff like saving settings from functioning properly.

I'm experiencing random failures / UI glitches (error codes 6 & 7) / visibly broken HTML

Almost every time those are caused by malfunctioning and/or badly written browser extensions. Always try opening tt-rss without browser extensions running (i.e. separate Firefox profile, Chrome incognito mode, etc). This way you will be able to figure out which extension breaks things.

One of the extensions that causes such problems is Lastpass.

I have upgraded PHP to 7.2 and now tt-rss complains about mcrypt

Mcrypt extension has been used to encrypt credentials for password-protected feeds via config.php directive FEED_CRYPT_KEY.

If you don't have any feeds with http authentication you can safely set FEED_CRYPT_KEY to an empty string and forget mcrypt ever existed. If you have any feeds with stored credentials you will either need to decrypt them first using older PHP version (7.1 or below) by running update.php --decrypt-feeds and then set FEED_CRYPT_KEY to an empty string.

If that is too much effort you will have to enter your login and password again for affected feeds in the Feed Editor. Your other data will not be affected in any way whatsoever.

What should I use - MySQL or PostgreSQL?

PostgreSQL should give you much better performance, especially if you tune it a bit.

I need an URL I can call to subscribe to feed to integrate with some third party browser extension/application.

SELF_URL_PATH/public.php?op=subscribe&feed_url=%s

SELF_URL_PATH = http://your.ttrss.server/tt-rss/

I need to get the number of unread articles in the simplest way.

SELF_URL_PATH/backend.php?op=getUnread&login=LOGIN

No password required. In single user mode, use “admin” for login.

Feeds stop updating for users who rarely login

See this thread: https://tt-rss.org/oldforum/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=2909&p=23459#p17145

I have used the update daemon before, but switched away from it. However, the UI keeps nagging me about the daemon not running or not updating feeds or whatever.

Find and delete daemon lock file in LOCK_DIRECTORY. Usually, it’s lock/update_daemon.lock. You can also remove update_daemon.stamp.

I have questions about article purging / I don't think purging works.

In short, you may and will see articles with date older than the cutoff for purging. Here’s why:

Starred articles are not purged.
Purging is done based on article import date internal to tt-rss which could be different from the date specified in the original feed (e.g. article has date 01-01-1970, but it was imported today).
When tt-rss sees articles still exist in the feed it bumps the import date because otherwise the articles will get purged and reimported periodically causing annoyingly reappearing duplicates. This is mostly relevant for rarely updated feeds.
Purging is performed when the feed is updated hence disabled updates = no purging.

Please see these forum threads for more information:

You can see article import date if you mouse over displayed date in tt-rss web UI.

I like to manually archive or delete articles and I get duplicates. Why?

Because the articles are still in the feed and get imported again.

Using Firefox, “OPML Import window” always visible in Preferences

Apparently it’s some addon or a browser setting problem, using clean profile helps.

Tasker client doesn't work

Read this thread: https://tt-rss.org/oldforum/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=3876

Schema upgrade fails on MySQL 5.7 (and newer)

Error message: Invalid default value for 'last_updated'

See this thread/post for instructions: https://tt-rss.org/oldforum/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=3871&p=22884#p22884

I have HTTP authentication enabled and get “Your access level is insufficient to run this script” error on login

The problem is that if you have auth_remote enabled in config.php tt-rss tries to automatically log you in as the user specified by the server using HTTP authentication, which may not have administrative privileges. You will need to either temporarily disable auth_remote (replace it with auth_internal in config.php), temporarily disable HTTP authentication, or give yourself administrative permissions using the SQL client:

    update ttrss_users set access_level = 10 where login = 'you';

I'm having performance problems, why is tt-rss so slow?

Most likely you don’t have enough hardware for your requested amount of feeds. Switch up to a faster VDS tier or use something else.