Stringer

June 9, 2026 · View on GitHub

Stringer has no external dependencies, no social recommendations/sharing, and no fancy machine learning algorithms.

But it does have keyboard shortcuts and was made with love!

Installation

Stringer is a Ruby app based on Rails, PostgreSQL, Hotwire (Turbo and Stimulus) and GoodJob.

Stringer will run just fine on the Eco/Basic Heroku plans.

Instructions are provided for deploying to Heroku manually, to any Ruby compatible Linux-based VPS, to Docker and to OpenShift.

Niceties

Keyboard Shortcuts

You can access the keyboard shortcuts when using the app by hitting ?.

Using your own domain with Heroku

You can run Stringer at http://reader.yourdomain.com using a CNAME.

If you are on Heroku:

heroku domains:add reader.yourdomain.com

Go to your registrar and add a CNAME:

Record: CNAME
Name: reader
Target: your-heroku-instance.herokuapp.com

Wait a few minutes for changes to propagate.

Fever API

Stringer implements a clone of Fever's API so it can be used with any mobile client that supports Fever.

Use the following settings:

Server: {path-to-stringer}/fever (e.g. http://reader.example.com/fever)

Email: stringer (case-sensitive)
Password: {your-stringer-password}

Translations

Stringer has been translated to several other languages. Your language can be set with the LOCALE environment variable.

To set your locale on Heroku, run heroku config:set LOCALE=en.

If you would like to translate Stringer to your preferred language, please use LocaleApp.

Clean up old read stories on Heroku

You can clean up old stories by running: rake cleanup_old_stories

By default, this removes read stories that are more than 30 days old (that are not starred). You can either run this manually or add it as a scheduled task.

Development

Getting Started

You'll need the toolchain versions pinned in .tool-versions (Ruby, Node, PostgreSQL, and pnpm). With those installed, run:

bin/setup

This installs dependencies, prepares the database, and launches the development server. The application will be running on port 3000.

On subsequent runs you can start the server directly with bin/dev, which boots Puma alongside the esbuild watchers for JavaScript and CSS.

You can launch an interactive console (a la rails c) using rake console.

Tests and linting

Run the Ruby tests with bundle exec rspec. Run a single file or example with bundle exec rspec spec/path/to/file_spec.rb:LINE.

Run the JavaScript tests with pnpm test (Vitest). This also type-checks and runs ESLint first.

Other checks: bundle exec rubocop (Ruby lint), pnpm eslint (JS lint), pnpm stylelint (CSS lint), pnpm tscheck (type check), and bundle exec brakeman (security scan).