TikTok RSS Using GitHub Actions

Generate usable RSS feeds from TikTok using GitHub Actions and GitHub Pages.

NOTE March 2024: This seems to work again due to improvements in the original TikTok library. It requires an on-the-fly patch to that underlying TikTok library, which is hopefully only temporary

Setup for GitHub Actions

• To get your own instance running

  • Fork this repo
  • Make sure to enable Actions in the Actions tab
  • Enable GitHub Pages for your new repo
  • Get a value of ms_token from your TikTok account as follows:
    • Log into TikTok on Chrome desktop
    • View a user profile of someone you follow
    • Open Chrome DevTools with F12
    • Go to the Application Tab > Storage > Cookies > https://www.tiktok.com
    • Copy the cookie value of msToken
  • In the Settings Tab for your Repo, go to Secrets and Variables > Actions
  • Create a New Repository Secret:
    • Name = MS_TOKEN
    • Value = The value you got for msToken above
  • Edit config.py to change ghPagesURL from "https://conoro.github.io/tiktok-rss-flat/" to your URL
  • Add the TikTok usernames that you like to subscriptions.csv

• It's set to run once every 4 hours and generates one RSS XML file per user in the rss output directory.

• You may need to update the msToken whenever your get GH Actions erros about TikTok returning an empty response

Running locally as an alternative

• You need Python installed
• Then setup with:

pip install virtualenv
python -m venv venv
source venv\bin\activate
pip install -r requirements.txt
export MS_TOKEN="blah"

• Then run each time with:

source venv\bin\activate
python postprocessing.py
git commit -a -m "latest RSS"
git push origin main

Feed Reading

• You then subscribe to each feed in Feedly or another feed reader using a GitHub Pages URL. Those URLs are constructed like so. E.g.:

  • TikTok User = iamtabithabrown
  • XML File = rss/iamtabithabrown.xml
  • Feedly Subscription URL = https://conoro.github.io/tiktok-rss-flat/rss/iamtabithabrown.xml
  • (Or in my case where I've set a custom domain for the GitHub Pages project called tiktokrss.conoroneill.com, the URL is https://tiktokrss.conoroneill.com/rss/iamtabithabrown.xml)

Acknowledgements

This uses an unoffical TikTokPy library to extract information about user videos from TikTok as JSON and generate RSS feeds for each user you are interested in.

Logo was created using the TikTok and RSS Font Awesome icons via CC BY 4.0 License

Copyright Conor O'Neill, 2021-2024 ([email protected])

License Apache 2.0