Optional Sources

Beyond RSS feeds, Distill can ingest content from several additional sources. Each requires either an API key or a data export.

Reddit

Ingest your saved and upvoted posts.

Install:

uv add 'distill[reddit]'

Configure:

[reddit]
client_id = "your-client-id"
client_secret = "your-client-secret"
username = "your-reddit-username"

Create a Reddit app at reddit.com/prefs/apps (choose "script" type).

Run:

uv run python -m distill intake --output ./insights --sources rss,reddit

YouTube

Ingest video metadata and transcripts from your liked/saved videos.

Install:

uv add 'distill[google]'

Configure:

export YOUTUBE_API_KEY=your-youtube-api-key

Get a key from Google Cloud Console with YouTube Data API v3 enabled.

Run:

uv run python -m distill intake --output ./insights --sources rss,youtube

Gmail (newsletters)

Ingest newsletters from your Gmail using the List-Unsubscribe header to identify newsletters.

Install:

uv add 'distill[google]'

Setup:

1. Create OAuth credentials in Google Cloud Console
2. Enable the Gmail API
3. Download credentials.json

Run:

uv run python -m distill intake --output ./insights --gmail-credentials path/to/credentials.json

The first run opens a browser for OAuth consent. A token.json is saved for subsequent runs.

Browser history

Read recently visited URLs from Chrome or Safari.

No extra installation needed.

uv run python -m distill intake --output ./insights --browser-history

Common domains (Google, GitHub, localhost, StackOverflow) are filtered out by default. Customize the blocklist in .distill.toml:

[intake]
browser_history = true

Substack

Ingest posts from specific Substack newsletters:

uv run python -m distill intake --output ./insights \
  --substack-blogs "https://newsletter.example.com,https://another.substack.com"

Or in config:

[intake]
substack_blogs = [
    "https://newsletter.example.com",
    "https://another.substack.com",
]

This fetches the Substack RSS feed and extracts full article text.

LinkedIn (GDPR export)

Import from your LinkedIn data export:

1. Request your data at linkedin.com/mypreferences/d/download-my-data
2. Download and extract the ZIP

uv run python -m distill intake --output ./insights \
  --linkedin-export path/to/linkedin-export/

Reads: shares, articles, saved items, and reactions.

Twitter/X (data export)

Import from your X data export:

1. Request your data at x.com/settings/download_your_data
2. Download and extract the ZIP

uv run python -m distill intake --output ./insights \
  --twitter-export path/to/twitter-export/

Combining sources

Use --sources to run specific sources, or omit it to auto-detect all configured sources:

# Specific sources
uv run python -m distill intake --output ./insights --sources rss,reddit,youtube

# All configured sources (auto-detected from config + env)
uv run python -m distill intake --output ./insights