News Aggregation App

This repository contains a News Aggregation app for Rocket Chat. The app allows you to aggregate news from various sources and share them within your Rocket Chat instance.

Installation

To install this app, follow these steps:

1. Clone this repository to your local machine:

git clone https://github.com/Spiral-Memory/News-Aggregation

2. Navigate to the News-Aggregation directory.

3. Open a command window and run the following command:

rc-apps deploy --url host_url --username your_username --password your_password

Make sure to replace host_url, your_username, and your_password with your Rocket Chat server URL, username, and password respectively.

Note: You must have a Rocket Chat server set up. If you haven't set up a Rocket Chat server yet, follow this link for instructions.

4. Once the app is installed, you also need to start the RSS parser and scraper. Since npm packages are experimental to use in rc-apps, external services are used for this prototype version.

To start the RSS parser and scraper, follow these steps:

• Go to the root directory of the project.
• Navigate to the backend folder.
• Use node scraper.js and node rssparser.js in 2 separate instances of terminal.

Features

This app currently supports 3 news aggregators: BBC News, TechCrunch, and NewsAPI, depending on what organization admin have enabled. It supports personalization at 3 levels: Workspace level controlled by the admin of the Rocket Chat server, DM level, and channel level personalization.

To enable different news providers at the organization level, follow these steps:

1. Go to RC app settings by clicking on the three dots present in the Rocket Chat app sidebar.
2. Navigate to "Installed," then "Private Apps."
3. Choose the "News Aggregation" app and then select "Settings."
4. Enable/disable the news provider you want and provide required API keys to enable those services.
5. To enable Google search and finding relevant articles, add the search engine CX ID as well. To generate that, information can be found here.
6. Once these features are enabled, navigate to any channel or DM, and use the command /personalize to perform personalization at the local level. Afterward, use the commands /get-news techcrunch, /get-news bbcnews, or /get-news newsapi to fetch the news from the respective sources. To summarize the content and find relevant articles, click on the "More" option for that message and then select either "Get Relevant Articles" or "Summarize News" based on your preference.

Feel free to try out different features of this app. Here's a video demonstrating all the features:

News Aggregation App Features Video

To learn more about the code, feel free to read my GSoC proposal on news aggregation app from here : https://github.com/Spiral-Memory/GSoC-Proposal