Editions

Your news, in magazine form. No algorithms trying to ruin your life.

Remember magazines? You'd pick one up, read it, reach the last page, and put it down. You felt informed, not anxious. Nobody had engineered it to make you feel behind, or angry, or unable to stop scrolling.

Editions brings that back. It's a self-hosted news reader that assembles your RSS feeds into finite, curated magazines — shaped by your interests, built on your schedule, and designed to end. You read it, you're done, you go outside. Revolutionary concept, apparently.

No engagement optimization. No unread counts screaming at you. No data leaving your server. No venture capital demanding you become addicted. Just your news, on your terms.

How it works

1. Subscribe to sources

Add RSS feeds. That's it. Your favorite blogs, news outlets, podcasts — if it has an RSS feed, Editions can read it.

2. Define your focuses

Create topic areas — "Technology", "Climate", "Local News", whatever you care about. An on-device ML model (zero-shot NLI, runs entirely on your server) reads every incoming article and classifies it into your focuses automatically. Nothing phones home. Your reading habits are nobody's business.

3. Build your magazine

This is where it gets good. You create edition configs — basically magazine templates with rules:

Section	Focus	Budget	What you get
Quick hits	Tech News	5 articles, under 5 min each	Fast headlines to start
Deep dive	Tech Policy	20 minutes of reading time	The regulation and politics behind the tech
Indie voices	Favorite Blogs	up to 10 articles	Brilliant people who don't have a marketing team
Long reads	Featured	5 articles, no time limit	The pieces worth settling in for

Each section draws from a different focus with its own budget. Source budgeting makes sure no single prolific feed dominates — that small independent blog gets a fair slot next to The Verge. Set a schedule (daily, weekly, whenever), and Editions assembles your magazine automatically.

You sit down. You read it. You reach the end. You feel done. That's the whole point.

4. Everything else

The feed — For moments between editions. A ranked stream of all your articles where the best stuff floats to the top. Think of it as snacking between sit-down meals.

Voting — Upvote and downvote articles to teach the system your taste. Here's the clever bit: votes propagate through semantic similarity. A few votes on climate policy articles will shift the ranking of hundreds of similar pieces you haven't even seen yet. Vote globally ("good article") or within a specific focus ("interesting, but not for this topic").

Bookmarks — Save articles for later. Some features don't need a pitch.

The stack

Nothing exotic, nothing that requires a PhD to deploy:

• Server: Node.js + Fastify + SQLite (via Kysely) — one process, one database file
• Frontend: React + Vite + Tailwind CSS + TanStack Router
• ML: Hugging Face Transformers.js — embeddings and classification run locally in a worker thread
• Deployment: Single Docker container, no external services, no cloud dependencies

Your entire news setup lives in one SQLite file. Back it up, move it, delete it — you're in control.

Get started in 60 seconds

Docker Compose (recommended)

services:
  editions:
    image: ghcr.io/morten-olsen/editions:latest
    ports:
      - "3007:3007"
    volumes:
      - editions-data:/data
    environment:
      - EDITIONS_JWT_SECRET=change-me-to-something-secret
    restart: unless-stopped

volumes:
  editions-data:

docker compose up -d

Open http://localhost:3007 and register — the first account automatically becomes admin.

Docker (one-liner)

docker run -d \
  --name editions \
  -p 3007:3007 \
  -v editions-data:/data \
  -e EDITIONS_JWT_SECRET=change-me-to-something-secret \
  ghcr.io/morten-olsen/editions:latest

Build from source

Requires Node.js 24+ and pnpm 10+.

git clone https://github.com/morten-olsen/editions.git
cd editions
pnpm install
pnpm --filter @editions/web build
cd apps/server
node --experimental-strip-types src/server.ts

Configuration

Editions loads config from these locations (later overrides earlier):

1. /etc/editions/editions.json
2. ~/.config/editions/editions.json
3. ./editions.json
4. Environment variables

Variable	What it does	Default
EDITIONS_HOST	Bind address	0.0.0.0
EDITIONS_PORT	Port	3007
EDITIONS_DB	SQLite database path	./editions.db
EDITIONS_JWT_SECRET	Secret for signing auth tokens	Random (sessions lost on restart)
EDITIONS_ALLOW_SIGNUPS	Allow new user registration	true

Important: Set EDITIONS_JWT_SECRET to a stable value in production — otherwise every restart logs everyone out.

Set EDITIONS_ALLOW_SIGNUPS=false after you've created your accounts, unless you enjoy surprise guests.

Quick setup

1. Register — first account becomes admin
2. Add sources — paste RSS feed URLs
3. Create focuses — define your topics and link them to sources
4. Wait — Editions fetches feeds, extracts articles, and classifies them automatically
5. Create an edition config — pick focuses, set budgets, choose a schedule
6. Read your first edition — ready on the next scheduled run (or generate one immediately)

Status

Editions is alpha software. It works, but expect rough edges, breaking changes, and the occasional "why did it do that" moment. Back up your editions.db before updating.

Something broken? Open an issue.

License

AGPL-3.0 — because your news reader shouldn't be a product either.