Self host your Podcast easily with potcasse

Author: Solène

Date: 21 July 2021

Tags: openbsd scripts podcast

Introduction

I wrote « potcasse », pronounced "pot kas", a tool to help people to publish and self host a podcast easily without using a third party service. I found it very hard to find information to self host your own podcast and make it available easily on "apps" / podcast players so I wrote potcasse.

Where to get it

Get the code from git and run "make install" or just copy the script "potcasse" somewhere available in your $PATH. Note that rsync is a required dependency.

Gitea access to potcasse

direct git url to the sources

What is it doing?

Potcasse will gather your audio files with some metadata (date, title), some information about your Podcast (name, address, language) and will create an output directory ready to be synced on your web server.

Potcasse creates a RSS feed compatible with players but also a simple HTML page with a summary of your episodes, your logo and the podcast title.

Why potcasse?

I wanted to self host my podcast and I only found Wordpress, Nextcloud or complex PHP programs to do the job, I wanted something static like my static blog that will work on any hosting platform securely.

How to use it

The process is simple for initialization:

init the project directory using "potcasse init"

edit the metadata.sh file to configure your Podcast

Then, for every new episode:

import audio files using "potcasse episode" with the required arguments

generate the html output directory using "potcasse gen"

use rsync to push the output directory to your web server

There is a README file in the project that explain how to configure it, once you deploy you should have an index.html file with links to your episodes and also a link for the RSS feed that can be used in podcast applications.

Conclusion

This was a few hours of work to get the job done, I'm quite proud of the result and switched my podcast (only 2 episodes at the moment...) to it in a few minutes. I wrote the commands lines and parameters while trying to use it as if it was finished, this helped me a lot to choose what is required, optional, in which order, how I would like to manually make changes as an author etc...

I hope you will enjoy this simple tool as much as I do.