uae-news-digest

Wake up to the UAE without opening ten news tabs.
uae-news-digest turns Google News RSS into a ranked, deduplicated terminal briefing with clean JSON for scripts and agents.

• Signal first. Preferred sources and UAE-specific keywords push important stories up.
• No repeat sludge. Exact keys plus fuzzy title matching collapse syndicated duplicates.
• Human or machine. Read the emoji digest in your terminal, or pipe stable JSON into agents, cron, Slack, or your own scripts.
• Bring your own feed. Use UAE by default, switch regions, or pass any RSS URL.
• Translate only when you ask. Optional DeepL support keeps the default path simple and dependency-light.

Install

bun add -g @drakulavich/uae-news-digest

Or run from source:

git clone https://github.com/drakulavich/uae-news-digest.git
cd uae-news-digest
bun install
bun link

Usage

uae-news-digest                                      # fetch + print UAE news
uae-news-digest --hours 12 --limit 10                # tighter briefing window
uae-news-digest --json                               # stable envelope for automation
uae-news-digest --region de                          # Germany preset
uae-news-digest --rss-url http://localhost/feed.xml  # any RSS feed
uae-news-digest healthcheck                          # JSON liveness probe
DEEPL_AUTH_KEY=xxx uae-news-digest --target-lang DE  # optional DeepL translation

Flag	Default	Description
--region <code>	uae	News region preset (uae, us, uk, de)
--hours <n>	36	Lookback window in hours
--limit <n>	6	Max items in digest
--target-lang <code>		DeepL target language (e.g. DE, FR, JA). Requires DEEPL_AUTH_KEY
--rss-url <url>		Custom RSS URL (overrides --region)
--state-file <path>	./seen_titles.txt	Seen-items state file
--timeout-ms <n>	15000	RSS fetch timeout
--topics-config <path>		Path to topics config JSON (overrides auto-detect)
--no-topics		Force legacy region mode even if a topics config is present
--dry-run	false	Preview without updating state
--json	false	Output as JSON (agent-friendly envelope)

What You Get

🇦🇪 UAE Latest News Digest

🛡️ UAE intercepts 79 Iranian strike assets (The National, 2h ago)
📉 Dubai property sales drop more than 30% (Anadolu Ajansı, 5h ago)
⛴️ Container ship incident at Khor Fakkan (Reuters, 3h ago)
✈️ Abu Dhabi airport reopens after rain (Khaleej Times, 1h ago)
🌧️ Unstable weather hits some emirates (Gulf News, 4h ago)
🛢️ Oil prices: OPEC+ mulls output increase (CNBC, 6h ago)

And when you need structured output:

uae-news-digest --json | jq '.items[].title'

Signal filter

Every run automatically surfaces headlines that materially affect an expat family in the UAE across four areas:

• Safety / threats — missiles, drones, airspace closures, evacuation alerts, storms
• Money / daily life — rent, fees, fuel prices, salary, fines, subsidies
• Rules / visas / documents — visa changes, new laws, permit and licence updates
• Logistics / infrastructure — flight disruptions, road closures, metro outages

Items that score above the threshold are pulled into a 🚨 Important block printed at the top of the digest, deduplicated from the regular listing below. Each important line shows a [signals] marker that explains why it surfaced. PR puff (launches, awards, "world's first/tallest/largest", festivals, and similar) is penalised and pushed down.

This is a heuristic — no API key required, always on.

Example output (topics mode):

🇦🇪 UAE digest — 2025-11-14

🚨 Important
  🛡️ UAE intercepts Iranian missile barrage (The National, 1h ago) [missile, airspace] — UAE Security
  ✈️ Dubai airport closes Terminal 2 for maintenance (Gulf News, 3h ago) [flight] — Travel

💰 UAE economy
  📉 OPEC+ weighs output cut for Q1 (Reuters, 4h ago)
  ...

In region mode the Important block has the same layout but without the — Topic Name suffix.

Topic match / matchMode

Google News sometimes returns loosely-matched articles for a query. Add optional match and matchMode keys to any topic to require real keyword matches in the article title:

{
  "topics": [
    {
      "slug": "schools",
      "name": "Schools",
      "query": "school fees Dubai",
      "match": ["school", "fees"],
      "matchMode": "all"
    }
  ]
}

Key	Type	Default	Description
match	string[]	—	Keywords that must appear in the article title. Omit to keep existing behaviour.
matchMode	"all" | "any" | <N>	"all"	"all" — every term must match; "any" — at least one; a positive integer N — at least N terms.

When articles are dropped for failing the keyword filter, a warning reports how many were dropped (visible in non-JSON mode on stderr). The CLI equivalents for region mode are --match <terms...> and --match-mode <mode>.

Agent workflow (key-free smart pass)

--json enriches every item with importance, tier (breaking | impact | neutral | fluff), signals, and matchedTerms. Pipe that to an LLM with the ready-made filter criterion:

uae-news-digest --prompt                         # print the filter criterion
uae-news-digest --json | claude "$(uae-news-digest --prompt)"

The agent can drop noise reproducibly based solely on the structured metadata — no extra API key, no custom prompt engineering required.

--prompt output:

You are a news filter for an expat family in the UAE. Keep only what materially affects safety, money, rules/visas, or logistics. Drop PR, launches, awards, rankings, and 'world's first/tallest/largest'.

Topics Mode

For per-topic digests (e.g. economy, real estate, regional politics) instead of one undifferentiated regional feed, create a digest.config.json file:

{
  "locale": { "hl": "en", "gl": "AE", "ceid": "AE:en" },
  "topics": [
    {
      "slug": "economy",
      "name": "UAE economy",
      "emoji": "💰",
      "query": "(UAE OR Emirates) AND (economy OR GDP OR inflation OR ADNOC OR non-oil)",
      "limit": 5
    },
    {
      "slug": "realty",
      "name": "Real estate",
      "emoji": "🏠",
      "query": "(Dubai OR \"Abu Dhabi\") AND (\"real estate\" OR property OR Emaar OR Aldar)",
      "limit": 4
    },
    {
      "slug": "chocolate",
      "name": "Dubai chocolate",
      "emoji": "🍫",
      "query": "\"Dubai chocolate\" OR pistachio OR kunafa",
      "limit": 3
    }
  ]
}

The CLI looks for the config in this order:

1. --topics-config <path> (explicit override)
2. ./digest.config.json (current working directory)
3. $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/uae-news-digest/topics.json (falls back to ~/.config/uae-news-digest/topics.json)

When a config is found, the CLI fetches each topic in parallel and renders one section per topic. Cross-topic dedup is "first topic in config wins" — reorder the array to set priority. To force the legacy region mode while a config is present, pass --no-topics.

--target-lang translates all section titles in a single DeepL batch. --limit, when explicitly set, overrides every topic's per-topic limit for the run.

The example query strings above are starting points, not optimal — iterate them against real Google News output.

Topics-mode JSON output

{
  "tool": "uae-news-digest",
  "version": "...",
  "mode": "topics",
  "query": { "hours": 36, "targetLang": null },
  "topics": [
    { "slug": "economy", "name": "UAE economy", "count": 5 },
    { "slug": "realty",  "name": "Real estate", "count": 4 },
    { "slug": "chocolate", "name": "Dubai chocolate", "count": 1 }
  ],
  "count": 10,
  "warnings": [],
  "items": [
    { "topic": "economy", "title": "...", "source": "...", "score": 0, "publishedAt": "...", "hoursAgo": 4 }
  ]
}

Items are emitted as a flat list in section order; each carries its topic slug so consumers can group. Legacy region mode emits the same envelope with mode: "region" and without the topics array.

Programmatic API

import { parseRss, buildDigest, runDigest, renderDigest } from "@drakulavich/uae-news-digest/core";

Use the core API when you already have RSS XML and want the same filtering, scoring, deduplication, translation fallback, and rendering logic without spawning the CLI.

How It Works

uae-news-digest --region us --hours 12 --limit 10
  │
  ├── Region ────── resolve RSS URL from preset (or --rss-url override)
  │
  ├── Fetch RSS ─── Google News RSS feed
  │
  ├── Filter ────── skip: opinion, tabloids, sports, travel
  │
  ├── Score ─────── +3 preferred source, +2 UAE mention, +2 priority topic
  │
  ├── Deduplicate ─ exact key match + Jaccard fuzzy (threshold 0.45)
  │
  ├── Translate ─── DeepL API (optional, when --target-lang set)
  │
  └── Render ────── region flag + emoji + title + source + hours ago

State file (seen_titles.txt) tracks seen articles so scheduled runs do not repeat the same briefing forever.

healthcheck uses the default live Google News RSS feed. For deterministic smoke tests, pass healthcheck --rss-url <url>.

Requirements

• Bun >= 1.3 (CI pins 1.3.14).
• CI validates Linux and macOS. Windows is not a supported target yet.

License

Made with 💛🩵 Published under MIT License.