Hugo Minify RSS Code Indentation Fix

It's certainly been a while since the previous post in this series, which has become the home of any updates I make to my Hugo website.

This post is a quick one but it's something I've been meaning to fix for a while. The RSS feeds that are generated will also include code blocks as defined through code fences or through {{< highlight >}} shortcodes in your post content.

However for some reason the code blocks generated in my RSS feeds were losing their indentation. Take this code snippet example from my latest post.

resource "aws_ssm_document" "patch_with_healthcheck" {
name = "PatchWithHealthcheck"
document_type = "Automation"
document_format = "YAML"
content = templatefile(
"documents/patch_with_healthcheck_template.yml",
{
healthcheck_document_arn = aws_ssm_document.perform_healthcheck_s3.arn,
output_s3_bucket_name = aws_s3_bucket.script_bucket.id,
output_s3_key_prefix = "ssm_output/",
}
)
}

Whereas it should be rendering as:

resource "aws_ssm_document" "patch_with_healthcheck" {
  name = "PatchWithHealthcheck"
  document_type = "Automation"
  document_format = "YAML"

  content = templatefile(
    "documents/patch_with_healthcheck_template.yml",
    {
      healthcheck_document_arn = aws_ssm_document.perform_healthcheck_s3.arn,
      output_s3_bucket_name = aws_s3_bucket.script_bucket.id,
      output_s3_key_prefix = "ssm_output/",
    }
  )
}

This is happening during the GitHub Action that builds the website - I am using the --minify parameter which follows this configuration by default, and the highlighted line.

[minify]
  disableCSS = false
  disableHTML = false
  disableJS = false
  disableJSON = false
  disableSVG = false
  disableXML = false
  minifyOutput = false
  [minify.tdewolff]
    [minify.tdewolff.css]
      decimals = -1
      keepCSS2 = true
    [minify.tdewolff.html]
      keepConditionalComments = true
      keepDefaultAttrVals = true
      keepDocumentTags = true
      keepEndTags = true
      keepQuotes = false
      keepWhitespace = false
    [minify.tdewolff.js]
    [minify.tdewolff.json]
    [minify.tdewolff.svg]
      decimals = -1
    [minify.tdewolff.xml]
      keepWhitespace = false

So what's happening is the RSS XML that Hugo generates for us is then being minified to remove the whitespace generated in that file. This includes the whitespace that's used to indent the code in the RSS feeds. Not. Good.

The Fix

In order to fix this we just need to copy the default minify config as mentioned above and change the last line to keepWhitespace = true.

You can view my git commit that fixes this - should you want to include the fix too.

I'm using toml for my config, so make sure you change it to what your config is defined in (yaml / json)

I tried to experiment to see if the whole config was required or not, but it appears so - if you found a way to omit some lines then let me know.

That's it - hope this help you with fixing your RSS feeds too!