Self-hosted dashboard and pipeline for turning playlists, RSS feeds, articles, and PDFs into concise Markdown notes and a weekly email digest.

AcidPulse is designed for a small home server or NAS as the always-on orchestrator, with summaries generated by a local Ollama instance running elsewhere on your LAN.

• Monitor YouTube playlists and RSS/Atom feeds.
• Add ad-hoc URLs for YouTube videos, articles, remote PDFs, and uploaded PDFs.
• Summarize content with local Ollama models.
• Classify summaries as news, tech, or deep.
• Write Obsidian-ready Markdown notes with YAML frontmatter.
• Send a weekly HTML email digest.
• Manage sources, queue, settings, and logs from a LAN dashboard.

Home server / NAS
  - Docker container
  - FastAPI dashboard
  - APScheduler jobs
  - SQLite state
  - Source discovery and content extraction
  - Obsidian Markdown writer

Ollama host
  - Any reachable machine running Ollama
  - Exposes Ollama HTTP API on the LAN

If Ollama is offline, discovery can still run and queued items are processed later.

1. Clone the repository.

git clone <repo-url> acid-pulse
cd acid-pulse

2. Create runtime folders and config.

mkdir -p data obsidian
cp .env.example .env

3. Edit .env.

Important values:

IMAGE_NAME=ghcr.io/infinition/acid-pulse:latest
HOST_BIND_IP=127.0.0.1
HOST_WEB_PORT=8765
HOST_DATA_DIR=./data
HOST_OBSIDIAN_DIR=./obsidian

OLLAMA_HOST=http://your-ollama-host:11434
OLLAMA_MODEL_SUMMARY=qwen2.5:14b
OLLAMA_MODEL_CLASSIFIER=llama3.1:8b

SMTP_HOST=
SMTP_PORT=587
SMTP_USER=
SMTP_PASSWORD=
MAIL_TO=

For LAN access, set HOST_BIND_IP to your server or NAS LAN IP. Keep it as 127.0.0.1 for local-only access.

4. Start the container.

docker compose pull
docker compose up -d

5. Open the dashboard.

http://<host>:8765

The default Compose file uses the published GHCR image:

ghcr.io/infinition/acid-pulse:latest

Available tags are created by GitHub Actions:

• latest on the default branch;
• branch tags such as main;
• version tags such as v1.0.0;
• immutable sha-... tags.

For local development builds, use the dev override:

docker compose -f docker-compose.yml -f docker-compose.dev.yml up -d --build

The repository includes a GitHub Actions workflow at:

.github/workflows/docker-publish.yml

On pushes to main or master, and on v*.*.* tags, it builds and pushes the Docker image to:

ghcr.io/infinition/acid-pulse

No extra registry secret is required when publishing from the same GitHub repository. The workflow uses the built-in GITHUB_TOKEN with packages: write permission.

After the first publish, check the package visibility in GitHub Packages. GHCR packages can be private by default depending on repository/account settings.

AcidPulse does not run LLMs inside the container. It calls an existing Ollama server over HTTP.

Example setup on the Ollama machine:

ollama pull qwen2.5:14b
ollama pull llama3.1:8b

Make sure the Ollama API is reachable from the Docker host. Test from the host:

curl http://your-ollama-host:11434/api/tags

You can change the Ollama host and model names from the dashboard CONFIG tab.

Tabs:

• OVERVIEW: metrics, live feed, manual batch and digest buttons.
• QUEUE: item status, retry, and delete actions.
• SOURCES: monitored YouTube playlists and RSS feeds.
• INGEST: ad-hoc URLs, bulk URLs, and PDF upload.
• EVENTS: full event log.
• CONFIG: Ollama, YouTube API fallback key, SMTP, schedules, and behavior settings.

Configured through .env or the CONFIG tab:

• DAILY_CHECK_HOUR: daily source discovery hour.
• RSS_CHECK_INTERVAL_MIN: RSS discovery interval.
• WEEKLY_DIGEST_DAY: digest day.
• WEEKLY_DIGEST_HOUR: digest hour.
• MAX_ITEMS_PER_RUN: max queued items processed per batch.

AcidPulse uses yt-dlp for playlist discovery and transcripts. YouTube captions can rate-limit (HTTP 429) if retried too aggressively. The app includes backoff behavior for this.

Optional:

• YOUTUBE_API_KEY: used only as a fallback for playlist discovery through the YouTube Data API.
• YT_COOKIES_PATH: optional cookies file for private or age-gated content.

A simple YouTube Data API key does not provide public transcripts. If captions are unavailable or rate-limited, a future audio transcription backend such as Whisper can be added.

The manual and scheduled digest use SMTP settings from CONFIG or .env.

The dashboard logs each mail stage:

• collect done items from the last 7 days;
• validate SMTP config;
• connect to SMTP;
• start TLS;
• authenticate;
• send message.

Some providers no longer support basic SMTP authentication. In that case, use a provider that supports app passwords/API-key SMTP, or add a provider-specific OAuth/Graph backend.

Markdown notes are written under:

<HOST_OBSIDIAN_DIR>/AcidPulse/

Each note includes frontmatter:

---
title: "..."
kind: youtube
source_url: "..."
author: "..."
published: 2026-04-25
processed: 2026-04-26
duration_s: 1840
word_count: 0
style: tech
tags:
  - acid-pulse
  - youtube
  - tech
---

docker exec acid-pulse python -m src.main --stats
docker exec acid-pulse python -m src.main --run-now
docker exec acid-pulse python -m src.main --send-digest

Inspect the SQLite state:

docker exec acid-pulse sqlite3 /data/state.db "SELECT id,kind,status,title FROM items LIMIT 20"

Do not commit:

• .env
• data/
• obsidian/
• cookies.txt
• SQLite database files
• runtime-config.json
• generated ZIP archives

These are ignored by .gitignore.

At idle the container is lightweight: FastAPI, APScheduler, and SQLite. Content fetching is mostly network-bound. LLM summarization runs on your external Ollama host, not inside the container.

MIT License. See LICENSE for details.