Provided by: libperlanet-perl_2.2.1-1_all 
NAME
perlanet - command line interface to Perlanet.pm
SYNOPSIS
$ perlanet
Or
$ perlanet config_file
DESCRIPTION
"perlanet" is a command line program for aggregating web feeds (both Atom and RSS) and publishing a new
web page and a new web feed containing the results of that aggregation.
COMMAND LINE ARGUMENTS
"perlanet" takes one optional command line argument, which is the name of a configuration file to use. If
no filename is given then the program looks for a file called "perlanetrc" in the current directory.
CONFIGURATION FILE
"perlanet" requires a configuration file which contains details of which feeds to aggregate and what to
do with the results of the aggregation. By default, "perlanet" looks for a file called "perlanetrc" in
the current directory, but this name can be overridden by passing the name of a different file when
calling the program.
The configuration file is in YAML format. YAML is a simple text-based file format. See <http://yaml.org/>
for further details.
Configuration Options
The configuration file can contain the following options.
title
The title of the resulting page and web feed. This option is mandatory.
description
The description of the resulting page and web feed. This option is mandatory.
url A URL which will be associated with the resulting page and web feed. This will usually be the address
where the web page will be published. This option is mandatory.
author
The name and email address of the author of the aggregated content. This item has two sub-items - one
each for the name and email address. This option is mandatory.
agent
This optional entry defines the agent string that perlanet will use when requesting data from web
sites. It's the name of the program that site owners will see in their web site access logs. Although
it is optional, it is strongly recommended that you give a value for this configuration option and
that the value you use includes contact details so that web site owners can get in touch with you if
they have any concerns about your use of their site.
entries
The maximum number of entries to include in the aggregated content. This option is mandatory.
entries_per_feed
The "entries" value above defines the total number of entries in the aggregated output feed. The
<entries_per_feed> value defines the number of entries to take from each of your source feeds. For
example, if this is set to 1 then there will only be one entry from each feed in your output. If
this value is 0 (or missing) then all values from all source feeds are used.
entry_sort_order
Entries have two dates, issued (which is the date that the item was first published) and modified
(which is the date that the item was last updated). This configuration option controls which of
these two dates are used to sort the entries in a feed. It can be one of the two values "issued" or
"modified". If this option is omitted, then "modified" is used.
cutoff_duration
Sometimes you might want your generated feed to only contain entries from, say, the last month. You
can do that with the "cutoff_duration" configuration option. This takes the form of sub-parameters
which are in the same format as you would use when calling the constructor for DateTime::Duration
(which isn't surprising as that's what happens to them). For example the to exclude entries that are
more than a month old, you would use:
cutoff_duration:
months: 1
opml
The system can optionally create an OPML file containing details of the feeds which are being
aggregated. This optional option controls whether or not this file is created. If it exists, it
should be the name of the OPML file to be created. If an OPML file is being created, then the "feeds"
options (described below) will all require a "web" sub-option.
page
This mandatory option contains the details of the web page to be created. There are two sub-options
- "file" gives the name of the file to be created and "template" gives the name of a Template Toolkit
template which will be processed in order to create this file. See the section "Output Template" for
more details on this template, and the web site <http://tt2.org/> for more information about the
Template Toolkit.
feed
This mandatory option contains the details of the web feed to be created. There are two sub-options
- "file" gives the name of the file to be created and "format" gives the format of the output
(currently 'Atom' or 'RSS').
cache_dir
This if you give a directory name in this option then perlanet will use the cache facility of
URI::Fetch. This means that web feeds will only be downloaded when they change.
feeds
This mandatory option gives details of the web feeds to be aggregated. Each item on the list has one
mandatory sub-option and two optional sub-options. The mandatory sub-option is "url" which gives the
URL of the feed. The optional sub-option "title" gives a title to the feed which can be used to
identify the entries that originate from this feed. The optional "web" sub-option gives a web site
URL associated with the feed (often the address of the web site that the feed comes from). This can
be used to create a list of the aggregated sites. The "web" sub-option becomes mandatory if you are
creating an OPML file. You can also add a "max_entries" option which will override the global
"entries_per_feed" setting. If this setting exists and is set to zero, then the output feed will
contain all of the entries from this input feed.
Example Configuration File
title: planet test
description: A Test Planet
url: http://planet.example.com/
author:
name: Dave Cross
email: dave@dave.org.uk
entries: 20
opml: opml.xml
page:
file: index.html
template: index.tt
feed:
file: atom.xml
format: Atom
cache_dir: /tmp/feeds
feeds:
- url: http://blog.dave.org.uk/atom.xml
title: Dave's Blog
web: http://blog.dave.org.uk/
- url: http://use.perl.org/~davorg/journal/rss
title: Dave's use.perl Journal
web: http://use.perl.org/~davorg/journal/
- url: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/feed/31?au=2607
title: Dave on O'Reillynet
web: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/au/2607
Output Template
The web page is created from a Template Toolkit template. This template is passed two variables.
feed
This is the XML::Feed object which has been used to create the aggregated feed. See the XML::Feed
documentation for details of the data that is held in this object.
cfg This is the contents of the configuration file, converted to a (nested) Perl hash.
Example Output Template
This is a simple template which uses the "feed" variable to display details of the aggregated feeds.
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
<title>[% feed.title %]</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>[% feed.title | html %]</h1>
<p>[% feed.description | html %]</p>
[% FOREACH entry IN feed.entries %]
<h2><a href="[% entry.link | url | html %]">[% entry.title | html %]</h2></a>
[% entry.content.body %]
[% IF entry.author OR entry.issued %]
<p>Published[% IF entry.author %] by [% entry.author | html; END %]
[% IF entry.issued %] on [% entry.issued | html; END %]</p>
[% END %]
[% END %]
<hr />
<address>[% feed.author | html %] / [% feed.modified | html %]</address>
</body>
</html>
In the future, the Perlanet wiki at <http://wiki.github.com/davorg/perlanet> will contain a cookbook of
useful ideas to include in the output template.
SUPPORT
To report bugs in Perlanet, please use the CPAN request tracker. You can either use the web page at
<http://rt.cpan.org/Public/Bug/Report.html?Queue=Perlanet> or send an email to bug-Perlanet@rt.cpan.org.
SEE ALSO
• perlanet
• Plagger
AUTHOR
Dave Cross, <dave@perlhacks.com>
COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE
Copyright (C) 2008 by Magnum Solutions Ltd.
This program library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as
Perl itself, either Perl version 5.10.0 or, at your option, any later version of Perl 5 you may have
available.
perl v5.36.0 2023-02-21 PERLANET(1p)