Gothos is an attempt at getting away from Pocket and self-hosting a simpler solution that suits my needs. I need a way to get to links that I save every day from my computers and to sync them between my devices.

Warning! The setup is convoluted and will most likely not work for you out of the box. I'm putting this up here mostly for future me to reference.

To make it work I decided to start adding links to my todo.txt file that I already keep in sync using syncthing, but any file syncing service will do.

The Python script (todo_parser.py) then periodically parses the todo.txt file and tries to retrieve page titles for newly added links. It then adds a "+parsed" file to the end of lines to know to skip them the next time.

Gothos is meant to be served from an http server. In my case it's Python's built-in server on a local Raspberry Pi Zero W.

• systemd (it comes with ubuntu-based distros that I use),

• python3 (I use its http.server module to serve the links site as well as to run the parsing script),

• todo.txt file or another plain text file where links are saved/synced to.

1. Pull the entire project

2. Modify gothos.service to match your system and path to gothos directory and place the file in /etc/systemd/system

   sudo cp gothos.service /etc/systemd/system/

3. Reload service files so that gothos can be started:

   sudo systemctl daemon-reload

4. Start the service:

   sudo systemctl start gothos.service

5. If the website can be accessed (by default on port 8000), enable the service:

   sudo systemctl enable gothos.service

6. Symlink or copy your todo.txt file into gothos directory

7. Modify the file_path in todo_parser.py to match your absolute path to todo.txt file

8. Automate running todo_parser.py. I added gothos_cron (with sudo chmod +x 777) to /etc/cron.hourly/ with the following content:

   #!/bin/bash
   
   python3 /home/pi/gothos/todo_parser.py
   

• rewrite youtube links as yewtu.be links
• add separate tags for videos in the website
• display url below/next to the title