Beehive

Beehive is a self-hosted app for people who follow more news, online stores and auctions than they have time to read. Tell it what you care about, and its AI picks the stories, sales and auction lots that match, with a one-line summary of each.

You read them on one page or in email digests on your schedule. Beehive runs on your own computer or server, for one person, and uses your GitHub Copilot account for the AI.

What it does · Quick start · Run it on a server · Documentation

What Beehive does

• Follow the news you care about. Pull in stories from any site's RSS or Atom feed, Reddit, Google News searches, Hacker News and the official feeds of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand, the NZ Government and the US Federal Reserve.
• See the best first. The AI scores each new story from 0 to 100 against what you told it and sums it up in one line. The home page shows each channel's top stories.
• Catch sales and restocks. A store monitor watches Shopify stores, Land & Sea, THE OUTNET, Mytheresa, END. and YOOX for new items, price drops and restocks.
• Never miss an auction. An auction tracker follows lots on All About Auctions. Watch a lot and Beehive emails you about an hour before it closes.
• Read long articles in brief. Ask for a Deep read and get the bottom line, key findings and figures of the full article.
• Get email digests on your schedule. Put channels into email groups, each with its own schedule.
• Research a one-off question. A research session gathers evidence from the news sources and writes an answer with numbered sources.
• Use your language. Pages, emails and summaries in English, Simplified Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, French or German.

The screenshots use made-up data.

Quick start

You need:

• Python 3.12 and git. Beehive is tested on Linux.
• A GitHub account with Copilot, and a fine-grained personal access token with the Copilot Requests permission. The AI runs on it.
• Optional: Azure Communication Services, to send email. Without it, Beehive prints each email instead.

1. Get the code and install it:

   git clone https://github.com/sinmentis/beehive.git && cd beehive
   python3.12 -m venv .venv
   .venv/bin/pip install -e ".[ai]"

2. Choose where the database goes, create a secret for sign-in cookies, and set your admin password:

   export DB_PATH="$PWD/beehive.db" SESSION_SECRET="$(openssl rand -hex 32)"
   .venv/bin/python -m scripts.set_admin_password

3. Start Beehive:

   .venv/bin/python -m scripts.run_web

   Beehive is now running at http://127.0.0.1:8000. It listens on all network interfaces, so other devices on your network can open it too.

4. Open http://127.0.0.1:8000/admin and sign in. Select New channel, keep the type Editorial, describe what you care about under What to focus on, and select Create channel. Then select Add source and add one, such as Hacker News.

5. In a second terminal, in the beehive folder, start the jobs worker. It fetches and scores the first stories right away:

   export DB_PATH="$PWD/beehive.db" COPILOT_GITHUB_TOKEN="github_pat_..."
   .venv/bin/python -m scripts.run_jobs

   Open http://127.0.0.1:8000/ again after a minute. The channel's top stories are there, with their scores and one-line summaries.

Leave the jobs worker running: it keeps every channel current and handles Fetch now, deep reads, email and reminders. Research has its own worker; see Configuration. Without the token, Beehive still collects stories but can't score or summarize them.

Run it on a server

deploy/ has rootless Podman units that run the web app and every background job, plus a nightly backup.

Important

By default anyone who can reach Beehive can read its home, channel, archive and search pages, and finished deep reads. The admin, research, the Watch List and every change need your password. To keep your reading private too, set Who can read in Global settings to Only you, after signing in.

Documentation

• User guide: channels, sources, deep reads, the Watch List, email and research
• Configuration: every setting, environment variable and command
• How it works: the pipeline, research and privacy
• Deployment: the Podman units, secrets, backups and releases
• Contributing · Changelog · Security · Design decisions · Glossary

Project status

Beehive 0.1.0 is an alpha. Its maintainer uses it every day, but database upgrades between versions aren't guaranteed yet.

License

MIT