Convert an RSS feed into Summaries Using a Webhook and Local AI

This guide shows how to configure Sosse to automatically summarize articles from RSS feeds using a local AI model. It uses 📡 Webhooks and Ollama, a Docker-based framework for running open-source LLMs locally. It’ll process articles from the Segment blogs, but you can adapt it to any RSS feed.

Note

This guide showcases the use of Ollama with the lightweight llama3.2 model for demonstration purposes. However, you can explore other models like llama3, mistral, or gemma. Feel free to substitute any supported model available in the Ollama registry.

Screenshot showing summary metadata

Set Up Ollama Locally with Docker

First, install and start the Ollama server locally using Docker.

  • Run Ollama in Docker:

    docker run -d -v ollama:/root/.ollama -p 11434:11434 --name ollama ollama/ollama

  • Pull a model:

    curl http://localhost:11434/api/pull -d '{ "name": "llama3.2" }'

You now have a local LLM endpoint running at http://localhost:11434 with the selected model.

Warning

This command runs a CPU-based model. For GPU support, check the Ollama Docker image documentation for GPU setup.

Note

You can test the functionality of the LLM by running a shell session with the following command:

docker exec -it ollama ollama run llama3.2

Crawl Policies for RSS Feeds and Posts

Create a crawl policy to handle RSS feeds (refer to ⚡ Crawl Policies for more details), navigate to ⚡ Crawl Policies in the admin panel, then create a new policy:

  • URL regex:

    ^https://segment\.com/blog/rss\.xml$

  • Set Recursion depth to 1 to limit recursion to articles only.

  • Under 🕑 Recurrence, specify the desired refresh interval, such as 1 hour.

Create a separate crawl policy to manage RSS posts:

  • URL regex:

    ^https://segment\.com/blog/

  • Set Recursion to Depending on depth, to have only articles referenced by the RSS feeds crawled.

  • Under 🕑 Recurrence, set Crawl frequency to Once to avoid re-crawling the same articles.

Define the Webhook to Generate Summaries

Navigate to 📡 Webhooks in the admin panel (refer to 📡 Webhooks for more details), and create a new webhook to process the crawled articles:

  • Name: Summarize Article

  • URL: http://localhost:11434/api/generate

  • Check Overwrite document’s fields with webhook response : This ensures that the response generated by the webhook will replace the content in the document.

  • Path in JSON Response: response

  • Check Deserialize the response before updating the document : This ensures that Sosse can parse the JSON content encapsulated within a text field in the response from Ollama.

  • JSON body template:

    {
  "model": "llama3.2",
  "prompt": "Summarize the following text into 2-3 concise sentences.

    Output only the result as a JSON object:
    {\"content\": \"...\"}

    Text to summarize:\n${content}",
  "stream": false
}

  • Method: POST

  • Test the webhook by clicking the Trigger button at the bottom of the page, you should get a response like:

    {"model":"llama3.2","created_at":"2025-06-01T15:27:08.617590502Z","response":"{\"content\":\"Example\"}", ...

Note

In case the webhook generates a Read timed out error, you can increase the timeout by modifying the requests_timeout configuration option.

Screenshot showing webhook configuration

We instruct Ollama to summarize the article’s content, provided in the ${content} variable, and return the result as a JSON object. The format aligns with the Rest API response, allowing us to modify any fields in the document.

You can now go back to the ⚡ Crawl Policies page and select the newly created webhook under the 📡 Webhooks tab.

Summarizing RSS Articles

  • Navigate to the Crawl a new URL page and paste the feed URL, such as:

    https://segment.com/blog/rss.xml

  • Click Confirm to queue the crawl job.

Accessing Summaries

From the homepage, you can perform a search to retrieve crawled articles along with their summaries:

  • Expand the params panel:

    • Sort by First crawled descending to display the latest articles first.

    • Add a filter: Keep Linked by url Equal to https://segment.com/blog/rss.xml.

  • Submit the search to view the articles and their summaries.

  • You can subscribe to a feed of these articles and summaries using Atom feeds <ui_atom_feeds>.