Briefr

Briefr is a cloud-native news aggregation platform that uses a serverless architecture to deliver personalized daily digests. The platform automates the extraction, processing, and delivery of news from user-defined RSS feeds into a clean, readable format.

System Architecture

The project is built on AWS using a modular architecture:

• Frontend: A React and TypeScript application built with Vite and Ant Design, providing a minimalist Reading Room for accessing digests.
• Backend API: A FastAPI server (Python) that manages user authentication, feed configurations, and provides a bridge to AWS resources.
• Serverless Engine: AWS Lambda functions triggered by EventBridge schedules to scrape RSS feeds, aggregate content, and generate HTML digests.
• Storage and Database:
  • Amazon S3: Stores the generated HTML digests with lifecycle policies for automatic cleanup.
  • Amazon DynamoDB: Maintains user profiles, feed metadata, and digest history with TTL-based expiration.
• Infrastructure as Code: Terraform is used to provision and manage the entire AWS environment, including VPC, subnets, and security groups.

Key Features

• Personalized Scheduling: Users can configure specific delivery times in their local timezone.
• Smart RSS Discovery: An auto-discovery engine that identifies RSS feeds from plain website URLs.
• Timezone-Aware Delivery: Automatic conversion between local user time and UTC for precise Lambda execution.
• Live User Metrics: A comprehensive archive dashboard that tracks usage statistics and total generated stories.
• Optimized Storage: Automated 48-hour expiration for all digests to maintain a zero-cost storage footprint.

Project Structure

• /frontend: React/TypeScript application and UI components.
• /backend: FastAPI service for authentication and resource management.
• /lambda: Python logic for the core news aggregation and processing engine.
• /terraform: Infrastructure definitions as code.

Getting Started

Local Development

Backend

1. Navigate to the /backend directory.
2. Create a virtual environment and install dependencies from requirements.txt.
3. Configure the .env file with your AWS credentials.
4. Start the server using python main.py.

Frontend

1. Navigate to the /frontend directory.
2. Install dependencies using npm install.
3. Start the development server using npm run dev.

Infrastructure Deployment

1. Navigate to the /terraform directory.
2. Initialize Terraform using terraform init.
3. Apply the configuration using terraform apply.

---