Use HTTP Proxy

Plagger User-Agents and Mechanize used in plugins are aware of HTTP_PROXY environment variable.

env HTTP_PROXY=http://proxy.example.com:8080/ ./plagger

would do the right thing.

Get authenticated Feeds

With Subscription::Config, you can embed username and password in the url just like what you do with the browser's Location box.

- module: Subscription::Config
  config:
    feed:
      - http://username:password@www.example.com/auth/feed.xml

Get authenticated Feeds using Cookies

You might want Plagger to access feeds or sites that require "login" state to browse the content. As of 0.7.1 release, you can share Cookies file with your browsers like Firefox, MSIE or Safari.

global:
  user_agent:
    cookies: /path/to/cookies.txt

would read the cookies.txt as Mozilla's format. index.dat is assumed of MSIE on Windows, while Cookies.plist is of Safari.

This way, Plagger uses those cookies stored in the Cookie file when Plagger::UserAgent? tries to fetch content in the remote URLs. Once you login to the site using your browser, Plagger doesn't have any problem accessing the site with the logged-in cookies.

Well, it's not normal that feeds require logged-in cookie to browse the feed itself, but it'll be sometimes true that you need a cookie to browse the content of the site, when you want to upgrade the feed using Filter::EntryFullText? for example.

Example

LiveJournal? provides RSS/Atom feeds that require user authentication, if you want to browse "Private posts" (that are shared only to Friends). Some feed providers do this by obfuscating the URLs, but it shouldn't be the correct thing to do and LJ just does it right.

So, when you want to access the feed using browser's cookies:

global:
  user_agent:
    cookies: /path/to/firefox/profile/cookies.txt
plugins:
  - module: Subscription::Config
    config:
      feed:
        - http://bulknews.livejournal.com/data/rss

alternatively, use LJ's secret digest authentication mode:

plugins:
  - module: Subscription::Config
    config:
      feed:
        - http://USERNAME:PASSWORD@bulknews.livejournal.com/data/rss?auth=digest

Either way, you can get the private posts in the feed. If you fail to login, all you get is just public posts.