Full Content Hugo Feeds : Random Geekery

Hugo defaults to filling your follow with the summary of every post. I prefer the full content of the most recent posts. Today I make my RSS feed reflect my preferences.

The Problem

Hugo RSS feeds have minor quirks that annoy me.

First off, it includes every page and post by default. The site content includes posts going all the way back to the year 2000. Most sites I subscribe to on Feedly show only the most recent posts. I want to do the same here.

Also, Hugo uses the .Summary of my content in the description for each item of the feed. There’s nothing wrong with this, but I like being able to read a full post without leaving Feedly - or whatever I use for RSS this week.

A Solution

The Hugo RSS Template documentation tells me what I need to know. I can change the entry count in site config, and handle the content of each entry with a template.

Limit Entry Count

Just the relevant bits of my config.json. Twenty entries seems like a good arbitrary value.

{
  "languageCode": "en-us",
  "copyright": "This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License",
  "rssLimit": 20,

  "author": {
    "name": "Brian Wisti",
    "email": "brianwisti@pobox.com"
  }
}

All The Content

All I need to do here is copy the default RSS template into layouts/_default/rss.xml, then make my changes.

My changes are small indeed. I place the post .Content in the description instead of the .Summary.

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

The full entry looks like this.

NOTE

Updated for Hugo 0.57, which changed how .Pages worked. Now use .RegularPages, and for top-level RSS use .Site.RegularPages

{{- $pages := .RegularPages -}}
{{- if .IsHome -}}
  {{- $pages = .Site.RegularPages -}}
{{- else -}}
{{- end -}}
<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>
        {{- $coverImage := .Resources.GetMatch "cover*" -}}
        {{- if $coverImage -}}
          &lt;a href=&#34;{{ .Permalink }}&#34; title=&#34;{{ .Title }}&#34;&gt;
            &lt;img src=&#34;{{ ($coverImage.Resize "600x").RelPermalink }}&#34; alt=&#34;{{ .Title }}&#34;&gt;
          &lt;/a&gt;
        {{- end -}}
        {{ .Content | html }}
      </description>
    </item>
    {{ end }}
  </channel>
</rss>

That ought to do it.

What Else?

What else I could do with the feed?

This RSS Best Practices Profile includes things I could tweak in my RSS template, though that’s more about nice form than any urgent need.
Raymond Camden wrote a post about adding a JSON Feed to your Hugo site. It might be fun to do that here.

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Added to vault 2024-01-15. Updated on 2024-02-01