Filter, Rewrite and Scraper Rules

Filtering Rules
Rewrite Rules
Scraper Rules
URL Rewrite Rules

Filtering Rules ¶

Miniflux has a basic filtering system that allows you to ignore or keep articles.

Block Rules

Block rules ignore articles with a title that match the regex (RE2 syntax).

For example, the regex (?i)miniflux will ignore all articles with a title that contains the word Miniflux (case insensitive).

Ignored articles won’t be saved into the database.

Keep Rules

Keep rules keeps only articles that matches the regex (RE2 syntax).

For example, the regex (?i)miniflux will keep only the articles with a title that contains the word Miniflux (case insensitive).

Rewrite Rules ¶

To improve the reading experience, it’s possible to alter the content of feed items.

For example, if you are reading a popular comic website like XKCD, it’s nice to have the image title (the alt attribute) added under the image. Especially on mobile devices where there is no hover event.

add_dynamic_image: Tries to add the highest quality images from sites that use JavaScript to load images (e.g. either lazily when scrolling or based on screen size).
add_image_title: Add each image's title as a caption under the image.
add_youtube_video: Insert Youtube video to the article (automatic for Youtube.com).
add_youtube_video_from_id: Insert Youtube video to the article based on the video ID.
add_invidious_video: Insert Invidious player to the article (automatic for https://invidio.us).
add_youtube_video_using_invidious_player: Insert Invidious player to the article for Youtube feeds.
add_castopod_episode: Insert Castopod episode player.
add_mailto_subject: Insert mailto links subject into the article.
base64_decode: This rewrite rule decode base64 content. It can be used with a selector: base64_decode(".base64"), but can also be used without argument: base64_decode. In this case it'll try to convert all TextNodes and always fallback to original text if it can decode.
nl2br: Convert new lines \n to <br> (useful for non-HTML contents).
convert_text_links: Convert text link to HTML links (useful for non-HTML contents).
fix_medium_images: Attempt to fix Medium's images rendered in Javascript.
use_noscript_figure_images: Use <noscript> content for images rendered with Javascript.
replace("search term"|"replace term"): Search and replace text.
remove(".selector, #another_selector"): Remove DOM elements.
parse_markdown: Convert Markdown to HTML.
remove_tables: Remove any tables while keeping the content inside (useful for email newsletters).
remove_clickbait: Remove clickbait titles (Convert uppercase titles).

Miniflux includes a set of default rules for some websites, but you could define your own rules.

On the feed edit page, enter your custom rules in the field “Rewrite Rules” like this:

rule1,rule2

Separate each rule by a comma.

Scraper Rules ¶

When an article contains only an extract of the content, you could fetch the original web page and apply a set of rules to get relevant contents.

Miniflux uses CSS selectors for custom rules. These custom rules can be saved in the feed properties (Select a feed and click on edit).

CSS Selector	Description
`div#articleBody`	Fetch a `div` element with the ID `articleBody`
`div.content`	Fetch all `div` elements with the class `content`
`article, div.article`	Use a comma to define multiple rules

Miniflux includes a list of predefined rules for popular websites. You could contribute to the project to keep them up to date.

Under the hood, Miniflux uses the library Goquery.

Rewrite URL Rules ¶

Sometimes it might be required to rewrite an URL in a feed to fetch better suited content. For example, for some users the URL https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2021/05/18/997501946/the-case-for-universal-pre-k-just-got-stronger displays a cookie consent dialog instead of the actual content and it would be preferred to fetch the URL https://text.npr.org/997501946 instead. The following rules does this:

rewrite("^https:\/\/www\.npr\.org\/\d{4}\/\d{2}\/\d{2}\/(\d+)\/.*$"|"https://text.npr.org/$1")

This will rewrite all URLs from the original feed to URLs pointing to text.npr.org when the article content is fetched. I also had to add my own scraper rule, because the default rule will try to fetch #storytext.

Another example is the german page https://www.heise.de/news/Industrie-ruestet-sich-fuer-Gasstopp-Forscher-vorsichtig-optimistisch-7167721.html which splits the article into multiple pages. The full text can be read on https://www.heise.de/news/Industrie-ruestet-sich-fuer-Gasstopp-Forscher-vorsichtig-optimistisch-7167721.html?seite=all

The URL rewrite rule for that would be

rewrite("(.*?\.html)"|"$1?seite=all")