How to Install feed2toot on macOS

feed2toot is a command line tool that converts RSS or Atom feeds into Mastodon toots. In this tutorial, we’ll go through the steps to install feed2toot on macOS.

Prerequisites

Before installing feed2toot, make sure that you have the following:

  • macOS 10.13 or later
  • Python 3.6 or later

Install feed2toot

Follow these steps to install feed2toot:

  1. Open the Terminal app on your macOS device.
  2. Install pip, a package installer for Python, by running the following command in Terminal:
sudo easy_install pip
  1. Install feed2toot by running the following command in Terminal:
sudo pip3 install feed2toot
  1. Verify that feed2toot was successfully installed by running the following command in Terminal:
feed2toot --version
  1. If you get the version number of feed2toot as the output, then it was successfully installed.

Configure feed2toot

After installing feed2toot, you’ll need to configure it to work with your Mastodon account. Here are the steps to configure feed2toot:

  1. In Terminal, create a new configuration file with the following command:
feed2toot configure

  1. Follow the prompts to enter your Mastodon instance URL, username, and password. If you don’t have a Mastodon account yet, you can sign up for one at https://joinmastodon.org/.

  2. Once you’ve entered your Mastodon credentials, feed2toot will generate a new access token for your account. Copy this token to your clipboard.

  3. Open the configuration file with the following command:

nano ~/.config/feed2toot/config.ini
  1. In the configuration file, scroll down to the “[mastodon]” section and paste the access token that you copied in step 3. Save the file and close the editor.

Use feed2toot

You can now use feed2toot to convert RSS or Atom feeds into Mastodon toots. Here’s an example command to convert the RSS feed of a tech blog into toots:

feed2toot https://example.com/feed.xml

This will post the latest articles from the tech blog to your Mastodon account. You can schedule this command to run periodically using cron, or integrate it with other automation tools to keep your followers updated on the latest news.

Congratulations, you’ve successfully installed and configured feed2toot on your macOS device!