Installing Tiny Tiny RSS on Bluehost

This post is obsolete, go to the updated post.

Scroll down past the installation steps, to see screenshots.

Here's my initial list of steps to install Tiny Tiny RSS on Bluehost, following the installation notes:

1. Download the source code.
   wget -c "https://github.com/gothfox/Tiny-Tiny-RSS/archive/1.7.4.tar.gz"
2. Unpack it.  Note: GitHub appears to give a download filename of "1.7.4"
   tar xzf 1.7.4
   cd 1.7.4
3. Open a web browser to the Bluehost cpanel.
4. Create the database there, as per Bluehost's instructions.
5. Import the tt-rss database schema.
   mysql -p -u [user] [database] < schema/ ttrss_schema_mysql.sql
6. Rename, read and modify the config file.
   cp config.php-dist config.php
   nano -w config.php
7. config.php changes: DB_TYPE to "mysql", DB_USER to your user name, DB_NAME to your database name and DB_PASS is of course your database user password.  Also SELF_URL_PATH to incorporate your host name.
8. config.php changes: You need to change PHP_EXECUTABLE to /usr/php/53/usr/bin/php.  The tt-rss website states that PHP 5.3 or newer is required, however by default PHP_EXECUTABLE points to version 5.2 of PHP on Bluehost.  Go to the PHP Config button in the Bluehost cpanel and select PHP 5.3 there, this will set your php.ini in your public_html directory and other things.
9. The main tt-rss page lists required PHP modules, which are mbstring and json.  These are present on Bluehost, and can be seen by reading the following generated file:
   echo "" | php > phpinfo.html
   pcntl is also installed, which is said to allow forked updating of subscriptions I guess.  php_basedir has no value, which should mean unlimited open files, but Bluehost may have some other resource limiting in place.  allow_url_fopen is on.  So it all looks good.
10. Put the "1.7.4" directory in place.  In my case, I had set my SELF_URL_PATH to disinterest.org/tinytinyrssx, so I executed the following:
    mv 1.7.4 public_html/tinytinyrssx
11. You'll probably want to look into this if you're migrating from Google Reader.  It mentions a script that will import more of your Reader data than just the OPML subscriptions.
12. Open your SELF_URL_PATH in your web browser.

At this point I saw the following:

Bluehost does not allow background processes, and in kills long running ones.  So I opted out of the background daemon feed updating approach, and went with a CRON job.  The given link suggests executing the script twice an hour, and gives the basic command line to use.

cd /home/disinter/public_html/tinytinyrssx && /usr/php/53/usr/bin/php /home/disinter/public_html/tinytinyrssx/update.php -feeds >/dev/null 2>&1

Filling in the form, like so:

Now, I was wondering what the login name and password was, or how to set them.  The installation notes are clear that you should log in with "admin" and "password" respectively.  You can change them once logged in through the Preferences menu, which is the first menu item in the Actions menu in the top right hand corner.

Having logged in:

The Feeds tab in the Preferences menu:

The OPML tab (the button is in the lower portion of the previous screenshot):

Having pressed "Import my OPML":

And back to the article view:

Nothing to see yet, I guess no updating has happened.  Looking at the CRON job, it was discarding output. I deleted the CRON job and executed the script by hand to find out it was erroring.

The reason for the error is that Tiny Tiny RSS does not support shared hosts, or so they say on their homepage.  What this appears to mean, is that sites like Bluehost which sell people like me accounts, sell accounts that run on shared hosts.  So the tt-rss update.php script when run from the command line does not have support for command line arguments.  I manually modified update.php and hard-coded a command line argument of -feeds.  This gave the following output, after an initial delay:

Content-Language: auto
Content-Type: text/html; charset=
[01:13:02/11932] Scheduled 100 feeds to update...
[01:13:03/11932] Expiring cache/simplepie
[01:13:03/11932] Removed 0 files.
[01:13:03/11932] Expiring cache/images
[01:13:03/11932] Removed 0 files.
[01:13:03/11932] Expiring cache/export
[01:13:03/11932] Removed 0 files.
[01:13:03/11932] Removing old lock files...
[01:13:03/11932] Removed 0 files.
[01:13:03/11932] Feed: http://community.livejournal.com/tads3/data/rss, 0000-00-00 00:00:00
...
[01:18:36/11932] Sending digests, batch of max 15 users, headline limit = 1000
[01:18:36/11932] All done.
[01:18:37/11932] Feedbrowser updated, 340 feeds processed.
[01:18:37/11932] Purged 0 orphaned posts.
[01:18:37/11932] Cleaned 0 cached tags.

And returning to my Tiny Tiny RSS website, updates have been pushed to my web browser:

However, there are obviously over 1000 articles unread.  Why are only four displayed?  This is because of the "Special" category shown in the left hand pane.  Within this, I can see that I am seeing "Fresh articles", which obviously are those unread and recent.  By selecting the "All articles" Special entry in the left hand pane, then ensuring "Unread" is selected in the first drop down in the right hand pane (see last screenshot, where it is already there for the "Fresh" articles).  Then I actually get all unread articles.

All the unread articles (which I've previously read on Google Reader) can be marked as read in the Actions menu.  However, the UI does not appear to update, and a manual refresh of the web page is needed. Otherwise, that's it.  The CRON job takes care of further updates. 

Edit: Changes to update.php..

...
        init_connection($link);

        // INSERT A HARD-CODED $argv VALUE
        $argv = array('-feeds'); 
        $op = $argv;

        // CHANGE THIS IF STATEMENT TO BE THIS
        if (count($argv) == 0){ // && !(defined('STDIN') || (substr(PHP_SAPI, ...
                ?> <html>
                <head>
                <title>Tiny Tiny RSS data update script.</title>
...
        }

        // CHANGE THE || TO && TO GET THIS TO WORK
        if (count($argv) == 1 && in_array("-help", $op) ) {