LIFEREA(1)

💖 LIFEREA 💖

okay bestie, pull up a chair, because this is liferea(1) — the manual page from the General Commands Manual section, and it's genuinely one of my faves. it's a whole desktop news aggregator and it's about to be your entire personality. let's go 🫶

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🌸 NAME 🌸

Liferea — a GTK desktop news aggregator. that's it, that's the vibe. 👑

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✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

liferea [OPTIONS]

like, that's the whole thing. she's simple. she's elegant. she ate. 💅

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🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

okay so Liferea (which stands for Linux Feed Reader, cute right?) is an aggregator for online news feeds. the way that it works is:

• you keep a list of subscribed feeds 📋
• you browse through their items 🔍
• you search through their items 🔍
• and it displays their contents for you 💖

and that's not even the best part. Additionally, Liferea lets you sync subscriptions and read headlines with online accounts of TinyTinyRSS and TheOldReader. literally cross-platform main character energy. 🌈

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🎀 OPTIONS 🎀

Liferea options, bestie. all of them. no skipping, i don't play like that. 💜

• -v, --version — prints version information and then dips out. exit stage left. 🚪
• -h, --help — shows you an option overview and exits. your lil cheat sheet. 📝
• -a, --add-feed=URI — adds a new subscription URI, which can be a feed or a website URL. drop it in, she's subscribed. ✨
• -w, --mainwindow-state=STATE — starts Liferea with its mainwindow in a specific STATE: shown or hidden. ninja mode activated. 🥷
• -p, --disable-plugins — starts with all plugins disabled. no add-ons, no extras, just vibes. 🙈
• --debug-all — prints debugging messages of all types. every single one. the firehose. 🔥
• --debug-cache — prints debugging messages for the cache handling. 🗃️
• --debug-conf — prints debugging messages of the configuration handling. ⚙️
• --debug-db — prints debugging messages of the configuration handling. (yes, bestie, that's what it says in the manual, i'm just the messenger 😭)
• --debug-gui — prints debugging messages of all GUI functions. 🖥️
• --debug-html — enables HTML rendering debugging. Each time Liferea renders HTML output it will also dump the generated HTML into ~/.local/cache/liferea/output.html. so you can go look at the raw HTML whenever you want. obsessed. 📄
• --debug-net — prints debugging messages of all network activities and displays the HTTP/S User-Agent string. 🌐
• --debug-parsing — prints debugging messages of all parsing functions. 🔬
• --debug-update — prints debugging messages of the feed update processing. 🔄
• --debug-vfolder — prints debugging messages of the search folder matching. 🔎

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🌈 DBUS INTERFACE 🌈

okay so to allow integration with other programs, Liferea provides a DBUS interface for automatic creation of new subscriptions. iconic behaviour, honestly.

the script liferea-add-feed is a convenient way to use this interface. just pass a valid feed URL as parameter and the feed will be added to the feed list. ✨

you can also pass non-feed URLs to use feed auto discovery. so flexible. so giving.

see the EXAMPLES section below for the receipts 💖

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🧚 ENVIRONMENT 🧚

• http_proxy (for HTTP connections)
• https_proxy (for HTTPS connections)

if defined and a proxy is not specified in the Liferea preferences (which uses the proxy settings provided by dconf), their value will be used as proxy URIs. both are used by many common CLI tools, so make sure to export them in a dedicated subshell. don't be messy about it bestie. 🙏

• LIFEREA_FEED_CMD_TIMEOUT — if defined, overrides the default timeout for feed generating commands with the number of seconds given in this variable. it must be an integer value greater than zero; invalid values will be ignored. so don't try anything cute. 💅
• LIFEREA_UA_ANONYMOUS — if defined, randomizes and anonymizes the default HTTP/S User-Agent string. incognito era. 🕵️
• LIFEREA_UA — if defined, its value replaces the default HTTP/S User-Agent string. full custom, no notes. 🎨

and here's the tea, bestie: LIFEREA_UA has always precedence over LIFEREA_UA_ANONYMOUS, so the latter can be safely defined in global shell initialization files. iykyk. 🤫

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💀 EXAMPLES 💀

$ http_proxy="http://proxy.example.com:3128" liferea
$ http_proxy="http://username:password@proxy.example.com:3128" liferea

will alter each outgoing request to use proxy.example.com on port 3128 as proxy. and if DNS resolution does not work, an IP address can be used instead. problem solved, periodt. 💅

$ LIFEREA_UA_ANONYMOUS=1 liferea --debug-net

will alter each outgoing HTTP/S request to randomize Liferea's version and hide the operative system in use. In addition, it prints the HTTP/S User-Agent and all outgoing network requests. stealth mode + receipts. 🔥

$ LIFEREA_UA="Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:10.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/10.0" liferea

will alter each outgoing HTTP/S request to pose as Firefox on Linux. she's in her cosplay era. 🦊

$ liferea-add-feed "feed:https://www.example.com/feed.rss"
$ liferea --add-feed "https://www.example.com/feed.rss"

subscribe to "example.com/feed.rss". and listen — remember to supply a valid and correctly escaped feed URL as parameter. escaping matters, bestie, do not skip that part. 😭

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🍓 FILES 🍓

• ~/.config/liferea/feedlist.opml — contains the current list of subscriptions. 📋
• ~/.config/liferea/liferea.css — stylesheet that can be used to override default HTML style. glow-up tool. 🎀
• ~/.local/share/liferea/liferea.db — SQLite3 database with all subscriptions and headlines. the whole memory palace. 🧠
• ~/.config/liferea/plugins/ — store manually downloaded extra plugins here. 🧩

Note that above paths are different if XDG_CONFIG_HOME and XDG_DATA_HOME are set. just so you're not out here looking in the wrong folder. 💜

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👑 AUTHOR 👑

this manual page was written by Lars Windolf <lars.windolf@gmx.de>. 🫶

updated on Nov 24, 2021 by Lorenzo L. Ancora <admin@lorenzoancora.info>. ✨

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and that's the whole page, bestie!! this is the LIFEREA(1) manual from the General Commands Manual, dated Jul 08, 2026 — go subscribe to something and slay 💅🌟💖