rss

rss

RSS feed generator. Add RSS feeds to any project. Supports enclosures and GeoRSS.

Usage

Create a new feed

var RSS = require('rss');
 
var feed = new RSS(feedOptions);

feedOptions

• title string Title of your site or feed
• description optional string A short description of the feed.
• generator optional string Feed generator.
• feed_url url string Url to the rss feed.
• site_url url string Url to the site that the feed is for.
• image_url optional url string Small image for feed readers to use.
• docs optional url string Url to documentation on this feed.
• managingEditor optional string Who manages content in this feed.
• webMaster optional string Who manages feed availability and technical support.
• copyright optional string Copyright information for this feed.
• language optional string The language of the content of this feed.
• categories optional array of strings One or more categories this feed belongs to.
• pubDate optional Date object or date string The publication date for content in the feed
• ttl optional integer Number of minutes feed can be cached before refreshing from source.
• hub optional PubSubHubbub hub url Where is the PubSubHub hub located.
• custom_namespaces optional object Put additional namespaces in element (without 'xmlns:' prefix)
• custom_elements optional array Put additional elements in the feed (node-xml syntax)

Add items to a feed

An item can be used for a blog entry, project update, log entry, etc. Your RSS feed can have any number of items. Most feeds use 20 or fewer items.

feed.item(itemOptions);

itemOptions

• title string Title of this particular item.
• description string Content for the item. Can contain html but link and image urls must be absolute path including hostname.
• url url string Url to the item. This could be a blog entry.
• guid unique string A unique string feed readers use to know if an item is new or has already been seen. If you use a guid never change it. If you don't provide a guid then your item urls must be unique.
• categories optional array of strings If provided, each array item will be added as a category element
• author optional string If included it is the name of the item's creator. If not provided the item author will be the same as the feed author. This is typical except on multi-author blogs.
• date Date object or date string The date and time of when the item was created. Feed readers use this to determine the sort order. Some readers will also use it to determine if the content should be presented as unread.
• lat optional number The latitude coordinate of the item.
• long optional number The longitude coordinate of the item.
• custom_elements optional array Put additional elements in the item (node-xml syntax)
• enclosure optional object An enclosure object

  /* enclosure takes url or file key for the enclosure object
   
    url:  _required_ url to file object (or file)
    file: _required_ path to binary file (or url)
    size: _optional_ size of the file
    type: _optional_ if not provided the mimetype will be guessed
                     based on the extension of the file or url,
                     passing type to the enclosure will override the guessed type
  */
   
  {
    'url'  : 'http://www.example.com/path/to/image',
    'size' : 1668, // 
    'type' : 'image/jpeg'
  }
   

Feed XML

var xml = feed.xml({indent: true});

This returns the XML as a string.

indent optional boolean or string What to use as a tab. Defaults to no tabs (compressed). For example you can use '\t' for tab character, or ' ' for two-space tabs. If you set it to true it will use four spaces.

Example Usage

var RSS = require('rss');
 
/* lets create an rss feed */
var feed = new RSS({
    title: 'title',
    description: 'description',
    feed_url: 'http://example.com/rss.xml',
    site_url: 'http://example.com',
    image_url: 'http://example.com/icon.png',
    docs: 'http://example.com/rss/docs.html',
    managingEditor: 'Dylan Greene',
    webMaster: 'Dylan Greene',
    copyright: '2013 Dylan Greene',
    language: 'en',
    categories: ['Category 1','Category 2','Category 3'],
    pubDate: 'May 20, 2012 04:00:00 GMT',
    ttl: '60',
    custom_namespaces: {
      'itunes': 'http://www.itunes.com/dtds/podcast-1.0.dtd'
    },
    custom_elements: [
      {'itunes:subtitle': 'A show about everything'},
      {'itunes:author': 'John Doe'},
      {'itunes:summary': 'All About Everything is a show about everything. Each week we dive into any subject known to man and talk about it as much as we can. Look for our podcast in the Podcasts app or in the iTunes Store'},
      {'itunes:owner': [
        {'itunes:name': 'John Doe'},
        {'itunes:email': 'john.doe@example.com'}
      ]},
      {'itunes:image': {
        _attr: {
          href: 'http://example.com/podcasts/everything/AllAboutEverything.jpg'
        }
      }},
      {'itunes:category': [
        {_attr: {
          text: 'Technology'
        }},
        {'itunes:category': {
          _attr: {
            text: 'Gadgets'
          }
        }}
      ]}
    ]
});
 
/* loop over data and add to feed */
feed.item({
    title:  'item title',
    description: 'use this for the content. It can include html.',
    url: 'http://example.com/article4?this&that', // link to the item 
    guid: '1123', // optional - defaults to url 
    categories: ['Category 1','Category 2','Category 3','Category 4'], // optional - array of item categories 
    author: 'Guest Author', // optional - defaults to feed author property 
    date: 'May 27, 2012', // any format that js Date can parse. 
    lat: 33.417974, //optional latitude field for GeoRSS 
    long: -111.933231, //optional longitude field for GeoRSS 
    enclosure: {url:'...', file:'path-to-file'}, // optional enclosure 
    custom_elements: [
      {'itunes:author': 'John Doe'},
      {'itunes:subtitle': 'A short primer on table spices'},
      {'itunes:image': {
        _attr: {
          href: 'http://example.com/podcasts/everything/AllAboutEverything/Episode1.jpg'
        }
      }},
      {'itunes:duration': '7:04'}
    ]
});
 
// cache the xml to send to clients 
var xml = feed.xml();

Notes

• You do not need to escape anything. This module will escape characters when necessary.
• This module is very fast but you might as well cache the output of xml() and serve it until something changes.

Inspiration

I started this module years ago (April 2011) because there weren't any Node modules for creating RSS. Nearly 50 modules use RSS, as well as many web sites and the popular Ghost publishing platform.

Contributing

Contributions to the project are welcome. Feel free to fork and improve. I do my best accept pull requests in a timely manor, especially when tests and updated docs are included.

About the Author

Hi! Thanks for checking out this project! My name is Dylan Greene. When not overwhelmed with my two young kids I enjoy contributing to the open source community. I'm also a tech lead at Opower.

Here's some of my other Node projects:

Name	Description	npm Downloads
npm‑check	Check for outdated, incorrect, and unused dependencies.
grunt‑notify	Automatic desktop notifications for Grunt errors and warnings. Supports OS X, Windows, Linux.
shortid	Amazingly short non-sequential url-friendly unique id generator.
grunt‑prompt	Interactive prompt for your Grunt config using console checkboxes, text input with filtering, password fields.
xml	Fast and simple xml generator. Supports attributes, CDATA, etc. Includes tests and examples.
changelog	Command line tool (and Node module) that generates a changelog in color output, markdown, or json for modules in npmjs.org's registry as well as any public github.com repo.
space‑hogs	Discover surprisingly large directories from the command line.
observatory	Beautiful UI for showing tasks running on the command line.
captionbot	Get captions for image using Microsoft's CaptionBot 🤖
grunt‑attention	Display attention-grabbing messages in the terminal
what‑dog	Get the breed of a dog from an image using Microsoft's what-dog.
anthology	Module information and stats for any @npmjs user
random‑puppy	Get a random imgur image url, by default a puppy.
grunt‑cat	Echo a file to the terminal. Works with text, figlets, ascii art, and full-color ansi.

This list was generated using anthology.

License

Copyright (c) 2017 Dylan Greene, contributors.

Released under the MIT license.

Screenshots are CC BY-SA (Attribution-ShareAlike).

Generated using grunt-readme with grunt-templates-dylang on Wednesday, January 11, 2017. _To make changes to this document look in /templates/readme/