WeWe RSS: Your WeChat Official Accounts, Now as Self-Hosted RSS Feeds

We all know the pain: you follow a dozen WeChat official accounts (订阅号), but the built-in WeChat reading experience is... not great. Notifications pile up, the algorithm buries posts you actually care about, and there's no easy way to pull content into your favorite RSS reader.

Enter WeWe RSS — a clean, self-hosted solution that transforms WeChat official accounts into stable, machine-readable RSS feeds.

What It Does

WeWe RSS is an open-source tool (Node.js + Docker) that bridges WeChat's walled garden with the open web. It:

• Scrapes WeChat official account articles via public profile pages (using a WeChat login cookie)
• Converts each article into a proper RSS feed item (title, description, link, pubDate)
• Runs as a local or server-side service
• Provides a web UI for managing subscriptions and viewing feeds

No reverse engineering WeChat's API. No brittle scraping of article lists. Instead, it uses WeChat's own "archive" pages (e.g., mp.weixin.qq.com/mp/profile_ext) that display a public list of past articles for any official account. It polls those pages, detects new articles, and pumps them into RSS.

Why It's Cool

1. Self-hosted and stable
You control the instance. No third-party service dependencies. As long as WeChat doesn't drastically change their public archive pages, your feeds keep working.

2. Full content in RSS
It tries to fetch the full article HTML (not just summaries), so your RSS reader gets the complete picture. That's huge for reading offline or on slow connections.

3. Works with any RSS reader
Feedbin, Miniflux, NetNewsWire, FreshRSS, or even plain Python scripts. The output is standard RSS 2.0.

4. Lightweight setup
Docker one-liner, env vars for configuration, and a simple web interface for adding accounts. You don't need Kubernetes.

5. Great for archiving
Want to keep a local copy of everything a particular WeChat account publishes? Set up a cron job that pulls from your WeWe RSS endpoint and saves to disk. Done.

How to Try It

You can either use the public demo (long-term availability not guaranteed) or self-host.

Self-host with Docker:

docker run -d --restart=always \
  -p 4000:4000 \
  -v ./data:/app/data \
  --name wewe-rss \
  cooder/wewe-rss:latest

Then visit http://localhost:4000 in your browser. You'll need a WeChat login token (instructions in the GitHub repo) — basically grab the token cookie from the WeChat official account page after logging in.

Add an account:

1. Find the official account's public profile URL (e.g., https://mp.weixin.qq.com/mp/profile_ext?action=home&__biz=XXXXXX).
2. Paste it into the web UI.
3. Wait a few seconds — your feed URL appears.
4. Add that feed URL to your RSS reader.

That's it. No magic. Just a clean pipeline from WeChat to your reader.

Final Thoughts

WeWe RSS is one of those rare tools that solves a real, annoying problem without overengineering. It's practical, open source, and fits naturally into any developer's self-hosted stack.

If you use WeChat for work, follow tech accounts, or just want to archive Chinese-language content in a sane way — this is worth 5 minutes of your time. Stick it on a Raspberry Pi or a cheap VPS, and you've got a permanent bridge out of the WeChat bubble.

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