Wrangling Hugo's RSS templates

I just lost an hour “fixing” Hugo’s handling of RSS feeds.

Hugo’s default rss template only includes each post’s .Summary, but I want to include the full .Content. There is no configuration setting for this, so in order to include full post content I have to override the entire template. This seems nuts to me, but whatever. I had already done this a while ago and it’s worked fine…until I updated Hugo to v0.55.0.

Hugo’s 0.55.0 release introduced (what I consider) a breaking change which caused the RSS feed to include all posts. The rssLimit configuration setting was replaced by a [services.rss] which relies on Config.Services.RSS.Limit. I wish someone would’ve told me. To be fair, there is something about this in the release notes but it’s not obvious and doesn’t call anything out as a breaking change, so I missed it.

I dutifully changed my settings to match, but it didn’t fix the problem. Of course it didn’t, because I’d overridden the default template and my version had no idea about Config.Services.RSS.Limit. The default RSS template is internal to Hugo but is shown in the documentation. I copied it over my own template, re-did my change to .Summary but still no luck. My RSS feed was still showing all posts. Turns out the version in the docs was wrong. Instead, I poked around the code and found the actual source for the default RSS template and copied that to ./layouts/index.rss.xml. Finally, I was again seeing full content and only the first 20 posts in the feed.

The problem then was that the feed contained entries for other non-post files that I’d edited. I only want posts in the feed, so I had to make an additional change to the template. The default is…

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{{- $pages := Data.Pages -}}

I changed mine to…

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{- $pages := (where .Data.Pages "Type" "post") -}}

Here’s my final version of the template.

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{{- $pages := (where .Data.Pages "Type" "post") -}}
{{- $limit := .Site.Config.Services.RSS.Limit -}}
{{- if ge $limit 1 -}}
{{- $pages = $pages | first $limit -}}
{{- end -}}
{{ printf "<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"utf-8\" standalone=\"yes\" ?>" | safeHTML }}
<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>

And in config.toml I’ve replaced rssLimit with this…

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[services.rss]
  limit = 20

If there’s an easier way to do all this I’d love to hear about it. Maybe the addition of the new [services.rss] section suggests other pending improvements. Ideally, I wouldn’t need to override the entire RSS template in order to make these changes. And I’ll be sure to read the release notes more thoroughly next time.