Netlify Plugin RSS

Generate an RSS feed from your static html files, agnostic of static site generator!

Demo

This is a file generated from the repo in /demo: https://netlify-plugin-rss.netlify.com/rss.xml

• note that it doesn't index anything outside of /posts: in our plugin inputs we specified dirToScan of /posts so only html files in that tree of folders is scanned.

The demo uses Eleventy to generate the site, but this plugin itself doesnt rely on any static site generator, that is the point (Eleventy has its own rss plugin).

How it works

You define a folder, the plugin recursively scans everything inside, sorts by publish date, and generates the appropriate XML.

This plugin uses Cheerio to extract data from your HTML, so you can use jQuery/CSS selectors to customize how to extract your content, title, publish date, and description metadata per item.

See our Demo for example of generated RSS from a /posts folder with nested html files.

Usage

To install, add the following lines to your netlify.toml file. For best results, we recommend customizing publishDateSelector and publishDateSelector:

[[plugins]]
package = "netlify-plugin-rss"
  [plugins.inputs]
  # required configs, customize as needed
  dirToScan = "/posts" # a subfolder to scan. "/" to scan all
  authorName = "swyx"
  site_url = "https://swyx.io"
  title = "swyx RSS Feed"
  rssDescription = "swyx.io RSS Feed"
  categories = ['Technology', 'JAMstack', 'Web Development']

  # # optional configs, defaults shown
  # rssFaviconUrl = "https://swyx.io/favicon.png"
  # docs = "http://example.com/rss/docs.html"
  # managingEditor = "authorName"
  # webMaster = "authorName"
  # copyright = "2020 ${authorName}"
  # language = "en"
  # pubDate = "new Date().toUTCString(),"
  # ttl = "60" # aka refresh every hour

  # # cheerio selectors for extractMetadataFromFile
  # # defaults shown
  # contentSelector = "main"
  # publishDateSelector = # if not specified, we use the date of file creation
  # descriptionSelector = "meta[name=description]" # probably no need to change
  # titleSelector = "title" # probably no need to change

  # # developer configs
  # debugMode = false # (for development) turn true for extra diagnostic logging

Future plans

WE ARE SEEKING MAINTAINERS.

• limit RSS length to last X posts?
• other feature requests?