FreshRSS plugin that provides cloudflare puzzle solving via flaresolverr
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Some popular publishing sites, including substack use Cloudflare to provide content caching and DDoS protection.
If cloudflare suspects that your machine is a bot, they throw up a challenge - this is normally just a page that requires your browser to run some javascript which filters out simple scrapers that don't evaluate scripts. This means that Freshrss sometimes fails to retrieve feeds protected by cloudflare and it isn't "smart" enough to pass these cloudflare filters on its own.
This FreshRSS extension uses Flaresolverr to start a headless browser (essentially a full copy of chrome or firefox but without a UI to look at) to parse and resolve these challenges and send the contents of an RSS feed through to FreshRSS as normal.
I stumbled across ryancom16's solution and decided to have a go at hardening it into a proper FreshRSS Plugin
You will need an instance of FlareSolverr running somewhere that is accessible to your FreshRSS instance. If you are using Docker Compose to manage FreshRSS then you can add FlareSolverr to your compose file. An example setup is shown below:
version: "2.1"
services:
flaresolverr:
image: ghcr.io/flaresolverr/flaresolverr:latest
restart: always
environment:
- LOG_LEVEL=info
ports:
- 8191:8191
freshrss:
image: freshrss/freshrss:latest
container_name: freshrss
environment:
- PUID=1000
- PGID=1000
- TZ=Europe/London
- CRON_MIN=1,31
volumes:
- ./data:/var/www/FreshRSS/data
- ./extensions:/var/www/FreshRSS/extensions
ports:
- 8081:80
restart: unless-stopped
Tip
2025/08/09: The new version of the plugin is not fully supported by latest yet (1.26.3). You can try running edge to benefit from the new behaviour no longer requires manual copying of files and changing folder permissions. However, edge is not stable so your mileage may vary.
- Copy this whole directory to your FreshRSS
extensionsdirectory. The easiest option is probably to clone this repo:
cd /path/to/freshrss/extensions
git clone https://github.com/ravenscroftj/freshrss-flaresolverr-extension.git-
Enable the extension from the settings page. If you get an error message in the logs that says
Cannot enable extension FreshRss FlareSolverr: server cannot write in /var/www/FreshRSS/p/apiyou can try runningdocker-compose exec -u root freshrss chmod 777 /var/www/FreshRSS/p/apiand then try enabling the plugin again. -
Paste in the URL of your FlareSolverr instance in the settings window. If you're running using the docker-compose setup above then you can enter
http://flaresolverr:8191.
-
Copy the feed URL in bold
-
Enable API Access via Administration -> Authentication menu.
Important
As of FreshRSS 1.26.4 the extension uses api_misc which means you will need to turn on API Access via Administration -> Authentication menu to use this extension. If you do not do this step then all feed URLs will simply say Service Unavailable!.
Prepend any feeds protected by Cloudflare with the URL. For example if your freshrss instance is at https://freshrss.example.com/ and you want to subscribe Sebastian Ruder's excellent NLP newsletter https://nlpnewsletter.substack.com/, you would take the full URL to the RSS feed https://nlpnewsletter.substack.com/feed and set the feed url in FreshRSS to:
https://freshrss.example.com/api/cloudsolver.php?feed=https://nlpnewsletter.substack.com/feed
You can set the maxTimeout parameter in the control panel or by passing maxTimeout=<miliseconds> as a query parameter on the feed URL. The system will use whichever is the lower of these two values. The default value is 60 seconds. This allows you to have flaresolver run for longer than 60 seconds if needed.
Since FreshRSS 1.26.4 the extension no longer needs to copy files around and instead uses the api_misc entrypoint so the cloudsolver.php file is no longer needed.
If you are running FreshRSS as a docker image you will likely need to disable and reenable the plugin after you upgrade the main application. You can do this by toggling the extension using the switch in the control panel:
You may also need to re-run docker-compose exec -u root freshrss chmod 777 /var/www/FreshRSS/p/api before you upgrade. This is because the extension works by creating a file in the /p/api/ directory of the application which is not persisted by the default linuxserver docker container. Hopefully I can find a way to fix this in future.
This plugin only works on exact URLs for RSS feeds at the moment. It can't be used to do feed discovery. This is due to a limitation with the way that selenium works.
If the text/translations are not showing up in the plugin settings screen you might be looking at it with the plugin disabled. Try turning the plugin on and the text should show up.
If turning on the plugin gives an and you are using FreshRSS V1.26.3 or older, you might be experiencing a permissions error. Check the system logs to confirm. Try running docker-compose exec -u root freshrss chmod 777 /var/www/FreshRSS/p/api and re-enabling the plugin.
If you're running FreshRSS V1.26.4 or later and the plugin prepend url has /api/misc.php in it, you might not have turned on API access. Go to via Administration -> Authentication menu and tick Allow API access.
If you are having trouble rendering the feed, you can append &debug=1 to the URL to see some additional information about the Flaresolverr endpoint and exactly what is being returned by the browser.
If you have suggestions or encounter problems, feel free to open an issue. If you'd like to make code changes, submit a pull request!