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Riccardo Bevilacqua
Riccardo Bevilacqua

Posted on • Originally published at riccardo.codes on

How to create an RSS feed in Next.js 10

What is an RSS feed?

RSS (RDF Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication) feed is an XML file used for providing users with frequently updated content in a standardized, computer-readable data format.

Why do you need an RSS feed?

Millions of users every day enjoy reading from several websites through a feed reader, such as Feedly. You need to provide an RSS feed for your blog not to give up a potentially large share of audience.

Furthermore you can use your RSS feed to cross-post to other websites, such as the popular dev.to (see here).

The Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs

Create a file rss.js in lib folder, or another directory of your preference other than pages, which as you probably know is a special directory reserved to routable content.

The new file would look like this (source here):

rss.js
rss.js

The mechanism is the following:

  1. generateRss:
    • accepts the full list of posts of your blog as input
    • prepares the structure of the RSS feed
    • injects a data structure for each post (see below)
    • returns the RSS feed as string
  2. generateRssItem:
    • accepts a single post as input
    • prepares the structure of an RSS feed item
    • returns the RSS feed item as string

I will help you, I have spoken

"What's going on in here?" you might be wondering.

Let's break it down, starting from the imports:

import { BLOG_URL, BLOG_TITLE, BLOG_SUBTITLE} from '@lib/constants'
import markdownToHtml from '@lib/markdownToHtml'

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I decided to stash some general information about the blog in /lib/constants.js, it's really up to you where you prefer to store these information.

The method markdownToHtml is a helper provided by Next.js blog starter, which allows you to convert content from markdown to HTML as you have surely guessed.

Side note: @lib resolves to /lib from anywhere, regardless the depth of the folder structure, thanks to jsconfig.json in the root folder (see here).

Since markdownToHTML is asynchronous, generateRssItem needs to be asynchronous as well in order to await for its result:

export async function generateRssItem(post) {
  const content = await markdownToHtml(post.content || '')

  // more code here
}

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An RSS feed item, which represents a post on your blog, is structured as follows:

  • guid is a unique identifier for the post, you can generate it the way you see fit
  • title is the title of the post, of course
  • description is the excerpt of the post
  • link is the absolute URL of the post, including protocol and base URL of your blog
  • pubDate is the date published
  • content:encoded is the full content of your post, which applies the encapsulation CDATA to assure your HTML to be correctly parsed

You can find a thorough list of properties here.

To assemble the whole RSS feed, all posts need to be scanned and converted to RSS items. The trick is using await Promise.all(posts.map(generateRssItem)) in generateRss to make this happen:

export async function generateRss(posts) {
  const itemsList = await Promise.all(posts.map(generateRssItem))

  // more code here
}

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Now that you have all RSS items, you can add some general information to the RSS feed:

  • rss is the root element of the XML document
  • channel is an XML element containing the whole blog data, comprising general information and all posts
  • title is the title of the blog
  • description is the description of the blog
  • lastBuildDate is the date of the most recent post
  • atom:link element needs your absolute blog URL in its href property

Finally you can inject the RSS items generated in the previous step.

This is the Way

In /pages/index.js there's a method getStaticProps, which is called by Next.js at build time (see here).

The idea is generating your RSS feed as an XML file precisely at build time.

To do so, first import generateRss and fs, then modify getStaticProps as follows:

export async function getStaticProps() {
  const allPosts = getAllPosts([
    'title',
    'date',
    'slug',
    'author',
    'coverImage',
    'excerpt',
    'content',
  ])
  const rss = await generateRss(allPosts)

  fs.writeFileSync('./public/rss.xml', rss)

  return {
    props: { allPosts },
  }
}

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A few tweaks have been introduced:

  • adding content to the array of fields passed to getAllPosts, used by generateRssItem to inject the full content of a post
  • generating your RSS using const rss = await generateRss(allPosts)
  • writing the result in an XML file, which must be placed in the public folder to be reachable by users and applications

A final touch would be updating your .gitignore to exclude rss.xml, which doesn't really need to be versioned.

An example of the final result is the RSS feed I generated for this very blog.

Who controls the spice controls the universe

You can now add a link to /rss.xml on your homepage to provide your users with a link they can add to their favorite feed reader.

Moreover on dev.to, in Settings > Extensions, you can specify your RSS feed URL for cross-posting.

Cross-posting from your blog to dev.to
Cross-posting from your blog to dev.to

This way every time you publish on your blog main branch, a draft will be automatically created on your dev.to dashboard. You might need to re-add the cover image, but your post will be there from top to bottom.

Conclusion

Next.js is still young and is missing some capabilities, such as RSS feed generation. However its design comprises only a handful of moving parts, which makes adjusting the project to meet your needs quite doable.

I'm fairly sure more features will come in time from Vercel and from Next.js community. Until then, don't be afraid to tinker with it.

Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.

― Carl Sagan

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