Enabling RSS Feeds in Hugo

At the behest of a fellow admin, who apparently digests solely rss feeds, and not content directly, my project this weekend became one to enable rss feeds within hugo.

Due to the relative simplicity of hugo, I figured that this task should be rather easy. Luckily, it was so.

With a simple google search, I found that hugo amazingly had rss capability built-in, as noted on their site. When using hugo, to generate an index.xml when creating the public output, simply create an rss template in one of the following locations. Hugo will search these locations in order:

layouts/index.rss.xml
layouts/home.rss.xml
layouts/rss.xml
layouts/list.rss.xml
layouts/index.xml
layouts/home.xml
layouts/list.xml
layouts/_default/index.rss.xml
layouts/_default/home.rss.xml
layouts/_default/rss.xml
layouts/_default/list.rss.xml
layouts/_default/index.xml
layouts/_default/home.xml
layouts/_default/list.xml
layouts/_internal/_default/rss.xml

Now hugo does offer a default rss template, as noted in the link noted above. This template will create a feed using all your posts, but will only utilize the summary of each post. Since I personally would prefer to read the full post content within my rss reader, one small tweak will pull in the full post content.

Change this:

<description>{{ .Summary | html }}</description>

to this:

<description>{{ .Content | html }}</description>

Here is my full rss.xml file that I decided to use, which I stored under layouts/_default/rss.xml, which is 99% identical to the template provided by hugo:

<rss version="2.0" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">
  <channel>
    <title>{{ if eq  .Title  .Site.Title }}{{ .Site.Title }}{{ else }}{{ with .Title }}{{.}} on {{ end }}{{ .Site.Title }}{{ end }}</title>
    <link>{{ .Permalink }}</link>
    <description>Recent content {{ if ne  .Title  .Site.Title }}{{ with .Title }}in {{.}} {{ end }}{{ end }}on {{ .Site.Title }}</description>
    <generator>Hugo -- gohugo.io</generator>{{ with .Site.LanguageCode }}
    <language>{{.}}</language>{{end}}{{ with .Site.Author.email }}
    <managingEditor>{{.}}{{ with $.Site.Author.name }} ({{.}}){{end}}</managingEditor>{{end}}{{ with .Site.Author.email }}
    <webMaster>{{.}}{{ with $.Site.Author.name }} ({{.}}){{end}}</webMaster>{{end}}{{ with .Site.Copyright }}
    <copyright>{{.}}</copyright>{{end}}{{ if not .Date.IsZero }}
    <lastBuildDate>{{ .Date.Format "Mon, 02 Jan 2006 15:04:05 -0700" | safeHTML }}</lastBuildDate>{{ end }}
    {{ with .OutputFormats.Get "RSS" }}
        {{ printf "<atom:link href=%q rel=\"self\" type=%q />" .Permalink .MediaType | safeHTML }}
    {{ end }}
    {{ range .Pages }}
    <item>
      <title>{{ .Title }}</title>
      <link>{{ .Permalink }}</link>
      <pubDate>{{ .Date.Format "Mon, 02 Jan 2006 15:04:05 -0700" | safeHTML }}</pubDate>
      {{ with .Site.Author.email }}<author>{{.}}{{ with $.Site.Author.name }} ({{.}}){{end}}</author>{{end}}
      <guid>{{ .Permalink }}</guid>
      <description>{{- .Content | html -}}</description>
    </item>
    {{ end }}
  </channel>
</rss>

Has been tested on OpenBSD 6.4